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THE MAKERS OF 
ENGLISH FICTION 



9(Q 



WORKS OF 

W. J. DAWSON 

Makers of English Fiction 

i2mo, cloth, gilt top, net $1.50 

One cannot read a single chapter of this book 
and say that literary criticism as a fine art is a 
thing of the past. Upon the foundation of absolute 
knowledge, and with a mind free from contempo- 
rary literary fads, Dr. Dawson points out the rising 
tide of fiction in the English tongue. The authors 
considered are not many, but each one is typical, 
and the list ends with Stevenson. The book is 
marked by insight, sympathy and common sense. 

The Evangelistic Note 

Third Edition. i2mo, cloth, net $1.25 
" One of the most remarkable and stirring of 
recent books. It is really the story of a great 
crisis in the life of a great preacher. Mr. Dawson's 
experience in his own church has justified his faith, 
and his book is a most stimulating treatise on 
homiletics and pastoral theology. It is epoch- 
making in character." — The Watchman. 

The Reproach of Christ 

With an Introduction by Newell Dwight Hillis 

The International Pulpit Series 

i2mo, cloth, net $1.00 

Seventeen selected sermons remarkable for their 
keen eyed piety and virile grasp of real questions. 
Aside from the power of his thought, Mr. Dawson 
has a beauty of style an diction that make anything 
from his pen charming reading. 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

PUBLISHERS 



THE MAKERS OF 
ENGLISH FICTION 



BY 

W. J. DAWSON 




NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

LONDON AND EDINBURGH 



Copyright, 1905, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 







stp r »yui> 

cjirrn 
1 a 



New York : 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 80 Wabash Avenue 
Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. 
London : 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PACE 

I. The Father of English Fiction ... 7 

II. Richardson, and the Novel of Sentiment . 19 

III. From Fielding to Jane Austen .... 30 

IV. Jane Austen, and the Novel of Social Comedy 41 

V. The Waverley Novels 53 

VI. Scott's Greatness 64 

VII. William Makepeace Thackeray ... 72 

VIII. Characteristics of Thackeray .... 84 

IX. Charles Dickens ....... 98 

X. The Greatness of Dickens .... 113 

XI. The Bronte's 124 

XII. George Eliot 145 

XIII. Charles Reade 164 

XIV. Charles Kingsley 179 

XV. George Meredith 191 

XVI. Thomas Hardy 213 

XVII. Robert Louis Stevenson 241 

XVIII. Religion in Fiction 268 

XIX. American Novelists 290 

XX. Concluding Survey 303 

5 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH 
FICTION 

Daniel Defoe, born 1661, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple- 
gate, London. Served in King William's army, 1688. Pub- 
lished a satirical poem, " The True-born Englishman," 1701; 
" The Shortest Way with Dissenters," 1703. Imprisoned in 
same year; released in August, 1704. Published "Robinson 
Crusoe," 1719; "Memoirs of a Cavalier," 1720; "Moll Flan- 
ders," " The Journal of the Plague Year," " The History of 
Colonel Jacob," 1722; " Roxana," 1724. Died in Ropemakcrs' 
Alley, Moortields, April 26th, 1731, and was buried in Bun- 
hill Fields. 

PROSE fiction, which has come to occupy so large 
a part in English literature, was relatively a late 
growth. It first takes definite form in Lyly's 
" Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," published in 1579. 
This book had an extraordinary success, due less to 
the story it unfolds, which is slight enough, than to the 
novelty of its style. Shakespeare was well ac- 
quainted with Lyly's masterpiece, for it is tolerably 
clear that he occasionally parodied, or perhaps imita- 
ted, its trick of antithesis, and its passion for orna- 
ment ; but Shakespeare did not perceive that it marked 
the genesis of a new kind of imaginative literature 
which was destined to usurp the place of the acted 
drama. Perhaps it appeared to him, as to all his con- 
temporaries, an illegitimate form of art. The drama 

7 



8 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

held the field. To find plots for his dramas Shake- 
speare ransacked the Italian novelists, without per- 
ceiving that Boccaccio and Bandello had invented a 
form of art capable of expressing all the passions of 
human nature not less successfully than the drama it- 
self. Nearly two hundred years later we find that the 
plays of the older dramatists were widely read. " I 
know, my dear, that you love to read plays," writes 
Miss Byron to Miss Selby, in " Sir Charles Grandi- 
son." Very slowly it came to be realised that the real 
drama, whether designed for the closet or the stage, 
was a cumbrous form of fiction. 

What was it that the dramatist set himself to do? 
He endeavoured to present his public with a transcript 
of human life, but under certain inexorable and highly 
artificial conditions. All that he had to say must be 
packed within the narrowest space. The subtilties of 
character and of thought must be indicated rather than 
expounded. He must trust to single phrases for the 
illumination of the greatest intricacies of motive. He 
must crowd a lifetime of vicissitude and experience 
into a few moments by the aid of histrionic art. It 
needed the actor to complete the indication of the 
dramatist; it needed his voice, his emphasis, his ges- 
ture, his personality ; it needed in a less degree the 
painted scene. Take away from the drama these ele- 
ments which are constituent to it, and three-fourths 
of its power is sacrificed. Very few dramas can be 
read as literature. Even Shakespeare himself gains so 
much at the hands of a Kean or an Irving, that not to 
have seen their interpretation of his genius is to form a 
totally inadequate estimate of it. Moreover, the read 
drama imposes a severe tax upon the attention. That 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH FICTION 9 

which moves rapidly and with ease before the visual 
eye moves cumbrously before the mind's eye. The 
sketch, the hint, the mere indication of character, to 
which the actor gives vital form, is apt to appear empty 
and crude to the reader, and irritatingly inadequate. 
The question, therefore, was certain to arise whether 
there was no better way of presenting a transcript of 
life to the reader than by the art of the dramatist. 
What was wanted was a method more leisurely, an art 
more deliberate, a broader canvas and more room. The 
novel came as answer to this demand. 

Daniel Defoe was the first English writer to per- 
ceive the uses of the new method of imaginative ex- 
pression. He stumbled upon the truth rather than 
discovered it. In 1702 he published his famous 
pamphlet called " The Shortest Way with Dissenters," 
in which he advocates, with the greatest sobriety of 
reasoning, that all Dissenting ministers should be 
hanged and their congregations broken up and out- 
lawed. It is a sardonic masterpiece. Its supreme 
merit lies in the perfect fidelity with which Defoe acts 
the part he has set himself to play. Not by the merest 
hint does he allow his real opinions to escape him. 
What he desired to do was to state the logical issue of 
the High Church argument against Dissent, and this he 
does with an art so perfect that no one perceives that 
his argument is meant to be absurd. He had uncon- 
sciously hit upon the primary principle of fiction, that 
fiction is a kind of lie, and that it is useless to lie unless 
you can lie so like the truth that you are believed. In 
this case, however, Defoe lied too well for his own 
profit. The pamphlet was accepted as genuine. He 
had duped and fooled both parties. When the fraud 



10 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

was discovered, both parties turned upon him. He 
was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned ; and when he 
came out of prison at the end of a year, he found his 
family starving and his prospects ruined. Under such 
disastrous auspices did modern fiction begin. 

Defoe had, however, discovered the real bent of his 
own genius. He could lie like the truth. He could 
make a tissue of invention, a fabulous story, a pre- 
tended argument, appear absolutely real and sincere. 
He was not slow to take advantage of his discovery. 
In 1705 he published his " True Relation of the Ap- 
parition of One Mrs. Veal." It is said that this bro- 
chure was written at the instigation of a publisher who 
could not sell one of the dullest books ever published, 
" Drelincourt's Book of Consolations against the Fear 
of Death." If this be so, the publisher of Drelincourt 
deserves immortality as the most sagacious of all pub- 
lishers. Defoe, to whom no sort of hack-work came 
amiss, did as he was bade, and the result was a ghost 
story told with such inimitable gravity, with such at- 
tention to detail, with such apparent sincerity, that it 
completely deceived every one. He himself acts the 
part of the impartial witness. He weighs the circum- 
stantial evidence for the the case with the scrupulous 
care of an agnostic lawyer. He makes the apparition 
talk of trivial things, such as a scoured gown which no 
one but a certain Mrs. Watson knew to be scoured — 
an excellent touch of art, for the very triviality of the 
subjects discussed gives the conversation an engaging 
air of credibility. He writes in a blunt, commonplace, 
homely fashion, admirably suited to his theme ; for he 
was shrewd enough to perceive that any attempt to 
decorate such a story with fanciful effects would at 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH FICTION 11 

once arouse suspicion. The entire method of Defoe's 
art is illustrated in this brief theme. He is a con- 
vinced Realist. He is consistently faithful to his own 
principle, that " lies are not worth a farthing if they 
are not calculated for the effectual deceiving of the 
people they are designed to deceive." It is part of his 
method to affect a gravity which, to the ordinary mind, 
must appear inseparable from truth. It is equally part 
of his method to accumulate details after the most ap- 
proved fashion of modern realistic fiction. He had 
deceived the whole town, and both political parties, 
with his sober argument for the hanging of all Dissent- 
ing ministers ; he again deceives his readers with this 
invented ghost tale, but with more happy results for 
himself. Henceforth Defoe knew that the proper ex- 
pression of his genius must be found in realistic fiction, 
so plausibly presented that it should appear as truth. 
All Defoe's subsequent fictions are built upon the 
same method. In 1719 he produced " Robinson 
Crusoe," one of the few immortal books in English 
literature. He was now fifty-eight, a broken, battered 
politician — a striking instance of how 4ong a man may 
wait before he discovers the nature of his own powers. 
So like the truth is " Robinson Crusoe " th«at it was 
accepted on its publication as a real narrative, and to 
this day multitudes of the uninstructed probably re- 
gard it in the same light. It bears some resemblance 
to the authentic story of Alexander Selkirk, but it is 
in theme rather than in incident. What finer justifi- 
cation of Defoe's method can be found than that the 
invented story of Crusoe appears quite as probable as 
the real story of Selkirk? Charles Lamb found the 
story altogether too homely, and said that it was better 



12 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

fitted for the kitchen than the drawing-room. Dickens 
complained of " an utter want of tenderness and senti- 
ment " in the account of Friday's death, and said that 
it was the only great novel which excited neither tears 
nor laughter. Later critics have lamented its lack of 
psychological interest. But these criticisms, after all, 
amount to nothing more than this, that Defoe chose to 
tell his story in his own way. He does not pretend to 
describe emotions ; he is content to relate facts. The 
state of Crusoe's mind is of less importance than his 
expedients to get the means of life. 

Opportunities of brilliant description such as Steven- 
son would have seized with eagerness, opportunities 
such as Tennyson has used to the utmost in his " Enoch 
Arden," Defoe ignores, as incompatible with his 
method. Perhaps it would be juster to say that he 
does not so much as perceive them. He was essen- 
tially a bluff, masculine, matter-of-fact man, and he 
tells his story in a matter-of-fact way. Prosaic ac- 
curacy of detail serves him perhaps better than heroics. 
The man he paints is a sturdy, plain-minded seaman, 
who sets himself to solve the problem of how to live 
under conditions which would have overwhelmed a 
more sensitive mind. It is the indomitable courage of 
Crusoe which charms us. He is typically Anglo- 
Saxon in his stolid endurance of fate, his practical 
grasp of circumstances, his ingenuity, his fertility of 
resource, his determination to make the best of his un- 
fortunate situation. He behaves after the manner of 
his race. Having by chance become the monarch of 
a desert island, he sets himself to govern it to the best 
of his ability, and to arrange his life with decent order- 
liness. There is something much more affecting in the 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH FICTION 13 

indomitable courage of Crusoe than there would he in 
any amount of sentiment. One supreme imaginative 
incident illumines the book — the finding of the foot- 
step on the sand ; but, apart from this, Defoe is content 
to kindle the imagination by mere truthfulness of detail 
in common things. And he does this so successfully 
that we are affected quite as deeply by Crusoe's pain- 
ful attempts to keep house and record the passage of 
time as we are by what may be regarded as the su- 
preme imaginative incident of the book. 

None of Defoe's later fictions have obtained the 
popularity of " Robinson Crusoe," yet they are all 
memorable productions. It has been the custom of 
critics to rate them much lower than " Crusoe," but 
this is a verdict which may be justly disputed. " Moll 
Flanders " and " Roxana " are much greater works 
than " Crusoe." They have a unique value as human 
documents and records of contemporary life. It is 
true that they are often unsavoury in detail, but so is 
" Oliver Twist." The man who sets himself to write 
about criminals can scarcely avoid the unsavoury. 
Vice, folly, and crime ; Newgate, the hulks, and the 
plantations of Virginia ; the exploits of highwaymen, 
and the duplicities of courtesans ; wickedness unde- 
tected, prosperous, and triumphant, and wickedness 
scourged to the bone by the undelaying fates, — these 
are the themes of Defoe's later fictions. How far he 
wrote them with a moral purpose it is difficult to deter- 
mine. Probably he persuaded himself that his main 
purpose was good. There is no reason to doubt the 
sincerity of the frequent homilies on the rewards of 
folly with which he interlards the progress of his nar- 
rative. If he wrote coarsely, it was because the age 



14 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

was coarse. Shakespeare, too, can be coarse, for his 
age permitted it. The question of coarseness must 
not be confounded with the question of immorality. 
It is quite possible for a book which possesses the ut- 
most refinement of language to be much more perilous 
to innocence than a straightforward narrative of a 
vicious career, which is expressed in blunt and homely 
language. Defoe's chief fault is lack of discrimina- 
tion in incident. He writes his account of vicious 
people in the spirit of a police-court journalist. He 
must needs tell everything, and he proceeds to do so 
with meticulous honesty. He does not perceive that 
the half may be more than the whole. He will leave 
nothing to the imagination. His passion for detail is 
so excessive that he does not omit things which might 
very well have been omitted without disadvantage to 
his narrative. But when we say these things, we must 
recollect that Defoe was the pioneer of an art entirely 
new in English literature. He had grasped only its 
primary principle, which was to produce the illusion of 
reality in a fictitious narrative. If, in working out this 
principle, he does not discriminate very subtly on the 
use of his material — arguing, as many a later novelist 
has argued, that because a thing is true in life therefore 
it is true in art — he should be readily forgiven an error 
which it has taken a century and a half to unlearn. 

Apart from this fault, inherent in the man and the 
age, the later fictions of Defoe are very wonderful 
productions. With what extreme vividness does he 
make us see his creatures and. the scenes through which 
they move ! We know all about what they eat, drink, 
and wear ; their houses, and the way in which they are 
furnished; the expenses of their tables and of their 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH FICTION 15 

journeyings; the interest they obtain on their invest- 
ments; the methods of the trades in which they are 
engaged ; and so on, through a mass of detail, by which 
we derive a truer picture of life two hundred years 
ago than any history has given us. Defoe is almost 
humorously exact in all that relates to money. One 
has often occasion to wish that modern novelists would 
tell us how their heroes and heroines contrive to live. 
The housekeeping bills of the splendid adventurer of 
modern fiction would interest us quite as keenly as his 
exploits. Defoe leaves nothing to seek in this respect. 
He audits the accounts of his sorry heroines with the 
exactness of an actuary. 

He has also an admirable, though unconscious, eye 
for scenery. We get to know the road from Harwich 
to London as if we had travelled it, and few pieces of 
descriptive writing are more impressive than his ac- 
count of the storm at sea between Holland and Har- 
wich. His sea-captains, merchants, and highwaymen 
are genuinely alive. His very absence of sentiment 
makes for lucidity of vision. He knows very well 
that the need of money is the mainspring of social 
life, and he is at no pains to disguise the truth. His 
women are frankly mercenary ; they are coolly count- 
ing their profits when they seem to be most the slaves 
of passion ; they know nothing of love that scorns 
banking accounts. Defoe never parades his power of 
analysis, but it exists ; and in his portraiture of women 
it is frequently subtle and acute. The successful at- 
tempt of Moll Flanders to pass as a woman of fortune 
on £500 makes very diverting reading. Defoe may or 
may not have known women of a different order, but 
it is certain that the women he has chosen to depict he 



16 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

knew to the bone. In his frank, daring, and almost 
brutal display of motive he often reminds us of Kip- 
ling, as he does also in his insistence on trivial detail. 
Crude as his stories are, considered merely as stories, 
yet they move and live. There are no dull moments, 
except when he preaches. His work may not be art of 
the first order; it may be but a sort of superb jour- 
nalism, as many critics have declared; but it is vital 
work. The same thing has been said of Kipling. 
Probably it will continue to be said of men whose 
power of vision exceeds their power of artistic com- 
bination. Yet the power of vision, the all-observant 
eye, is after all the great thing, and the most marked 
feature of genius ; and this power Defoe had in a very 
high degree. 

One other observation may be made on the material 
of Defoe's fictions. It is commonplace, coarse, and 
often squalid, and no doubt the modern reader will 
wish that so great a genius had been devoted to themes 
more worthy. But it is a thing apparently inevitable 
in the beginnings of any new form of literary art that 
it should find its material in the grosser emotions of 
humanity. The tales of Boccaccio and Bandello are 
cases in point. So also are the plays of the Elizabethan 
dramatists. Just as the child loves crude, strong, pri- 
mary colours, so the early novelists and dramatists used 
primary passions for their art. Their pictures are 
masses of light and gross shadow. The plain elemental 
emotions attract them, and they deal with them fear- 
lessly. It needs the culture of many generations to 
educate the eye to softer gradations of colour, to pro- 
duce the delicacy of touch which can coax the subtler 
workings of the soul to light, which can so refine both 



THE FATHER OF ENGLISH FICTION 17 

taste and art that the thoughts of a simple girl like 
Maggie Tulliver shall become as dramatically absorb- 
ing as the shudderings of a Moll Flanders under the 
shadow of the gallows. Defoe is scarcely to be blamed 
for using his new-found art upon gross themes ; it was 
a necessity of the art itself. He laid his hand upon 
the most dramatic material he could find, which was 
the " Newgate Calendar," just as the Elizabethan 
dramatists seized upon the violent and criminal epi- 
sodes of Italian history, constructing from them 
dramas of tremendous force, which took small account 
of taste. The only moral question involved is whether 
work of this kind is done in a masculine, healthy, ro- 
bust fashion. As far as Defoe is concerned, the ques- 
tion is easily answered. He is always masculine, and 
his very coarseness is a sign of health. He is a big, 
rough-fibred Englishman, who has no idea that any 
one can be offended in him because he tells the blunt 
truth, and his art is so full of wholesome vigour that 
it partly redeems its material. 

Of the later works of Defoe, the " Journal of the 
Plague " is the most memorable. His art of obtain- 
ing verisimilitude by the accumulation of detail never 
reached so high a point. The complete triumph of 
his method is proved, as in the case of " Crusoe," by 
the fact that this imaginary fiction has been constantly 
accepted as authentic history. Defoe, as we have seen, 
did not attempt fiction till he was virtually an old man. 
He probably had no idea of the value of the art which 
he had discovered. He was not the sort of man to 
give himself airs upon the invention of a new literary 
vehicle of expression. He wrote for bread, wrote 
carelessly and hastily, and cared very little for any- 



18 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

thing beyond the immediate reward of his exertions. 
Nevertheless, he was a great man; of limited but in- 
tense imagination, of infinite invention, of immense 
force; who built better than he knew, for much that 
he has written is immortal, and no defects in his writ- 
ings can be weighed for a moment against the claim 
that he must justly be regarded as the Father of 
English Fiction. 



II 

RICHARDSON, AND THE NOVEL 
OF SENTIMENT 

Samuel Richardson, bom 1689 in Derbyshire. Published 
" Pamela " in 1740; " Clarissa Harlowe," 1748; " Sir Charles 
Grandison," 1753. Died 1761. 

DEFOE'S method found its greatest imitator in 
Swift. " Gulliver's Travels," published in 
1726, is a book which perhaps would never 
have been written but for the success of " Robinson 
Crusoe." Swift was quick to realise the potencies of 
the new literary vehicle which Defoe had invented. 
But he brought to the practice of the new art a mind 
of incomparably greater range. Defoe was capable of 
describing ordinary human actions with admirable and 
vivid realism ; Swift created an absolutely unreal 
world, yet with such perfect accuracy of detail that 
it appears real. Robinson Crusoe is an ordinary 
human creature ; Gulliver is a human creature too, but 
he is made to move in a totally imaginary world. The 
voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag are, humanly 
speaking, impossible. The imaginations of a child may 
accept pygmies, dwarfs, and giants as credible, but the 
more sophisticated imagination of the man rejects them. 
Defoe makes the ghost of Mrs. Veal credible, but he 
was incapable of inventing Lilliput and Brobdingnag. 
To do this required a prodigious and sustained power 

19 



20 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of invention. Each part of the narrative must be 
fitted and proportioned with an infinite nicety. The 
least fault in invention destroys the entire structure. 
The story is inherently absurd; it is only by the most 
delicate proportion of its parts that it can impose its 
illusion upon the mind. Swift is the only writer who 
has perfectly succeeded in this most difficult of arts. 

in saying this we should not forget Bunyan, or 
so modern a writer as Mr. Lewis Carroll. Each 
creates an impossible world, sustaining his illusion by 
constant ingenuity of invention. But even Bunyan is 
not uniformly successful. The picture Bunyan draws 
of the Slough of Despond is a case in point. Morally 
considered it is intelligible enough, and Bunyan was 
right in reckoning on the moral intuitions of his 
readers for its interpretation. But considered as a 
piece of fiction it does not for a moment impose upon 
the imagination. The Slough is said to be in a field, 
quite visible, and therefore easily avoided ; yet Chris- 
tian falls into it. Christian does not appear to be 
aware of its existence until he begins running ; and yet 
it was close to his own home, and he must have seen it 
every day. Swift never makes such errors as these. 
His imagination is constantly controlled by the strong- 
est logical faculty. Having once granted his premise, 
that a Lilliput or a Brobdingnag may exist, his logic 
moves without a flaw. Gulliver behaves exactly as a 
human creature would behave under the conditions de- 
picted, and the pygmies and giants among whom he 
moves behave exactly as such creatures would behave 
if they were equipped with human reason. There is a 
sort of mathematical accuracy in Swift's method. 
Every part of his picture is consistent, harmonious, 



THE NOVEL OF SENTIMENT 21 

proportionate, and the most impossible incidents are 
narrated with such perfect gravity that the reason and 
imagination are equally satisfied and delighted. Defoe's 
principle of lying so like the truth as to be believed is 
here carried to its ultimate expression ; for in " Gulli- 
ver's Travels " we have a record which we know to be 
false, and never for a moment imagine to be true, 
yet we find nothing absurd in it, nothing that is not 
logically convincing. 

In the proper sense, or at least in the accepted sense 
of the term, it is doubtful, however, if Swift should be 
ranked among the writers of fiction. He is rather an 
instance of a man of supreme genius who took up a 
literary medium* which happened to suit him, and bent 
it to his own ends, without the least regard for its true 
uses. He wanted an effect ; he cared as little how he 
got it as Turner did when he stuck a red wafer on his 
picture to represent the setting sun. He did nothing 
to advance the art of fiction ; he only showed us what 
could be made of it by a m-an who strangely combined 
pitiless logic and intense imaginative power with an 
embittered mind and a foul heart. One cannot acquit 
Swift of an indecency which goes deeper than the use 
of coarse material ; it is an indecency of the heart. He 
loathed the human race so thoroughly that he took a 
rancorous pleasure in its degradation. Mankind was 
to him a race of Yahoos, foul, unclean, brutal, and 
incapable of redemption. " A Republic of the Beasts " 
displays far higher virtues, a nobler temperance, a 
finer magnanimity, a loftier intelligence. In the tenth 
chapter of his " Voyage to the Houyhnhnms " Gulliver 
breaks out into passionate vituperation against man- 
kind and all its ways, thanking heaven that at last he 



22 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

has found among the beasts what human society could 
not give him — a world where there was " neither 
physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my 
fortune ; no informer to watch my words and actions, 
or forge accusations against me for hire ; no gibers, 
censurers, backbiters — no encouragers of vice by 
seducement or examples ; no dungeons, axes, gibbets, 
whipping-posts, or pillories — no scoundrels raised from 
the dust for the sake of their vices ; or nobility thrown 
into it on account of their virtues," and so on, through 
an interminable catalogue of all the basest things in 
human nature. What filled the heart of Swift with 
this ferocious rage against his kind is an unanswered 
question. There is something too awful in it for either 
blame or pity — something that goes beyond reason and 
the rebuke of reason ; it excites only the kind of terror 
which we experience when we listen to the ravings of 
the mad. Yet through it all the genius of the man 
shines so resplendent that we cannot refuse a sort of 
resentful admiration. Such vast powers of mind 
scarcely any other English writer has possessed ; and 
never was power so abused. 

The work of Swift was rather an aberration than a 
development in the art of fiction. The seed sown by 
Defoe had fallen into a strange soil, and had sprung 
up in a monstrous flower, but it was clear that the line 
of right development must lie in other directions. The 
new development was to come from Samuel Richard- 
son, who published his " Pamela " in 1740. 

Nothing could have seemed more unlikely than that 
such a man as Richardson should give new impulse 
and direction to English fiction. He was intellectually 
and morally a small man, with very strict and narrow 



THE NOVEL OF SENTIMENT 23 

views of life. He was in spirit a sort of eighteenth- 
century Martin Tupper, precise, commonplace, full of 
little moral maxims, devoted to the proprieties, fond of 
adulation, the idol of female coteries, knowing nothing 
of life in its larger aspects, sedulous in skirting the 
edge of its most virile realities, and perfectly con- 
vinced that his quiet corner of the world stood for the 
entire universe. Richardson reminds us of a com- 
fortable cat who purrs on ladies' laps, treads delicately, 
and makes no more adventurous pilgrimage than to the 
kitchen area. Defoe and Swift at least have masculine 
and massive good sense ; Richardson is an old maid. 
He has all the tedious garrulity of an old maid who 
finds the interest of life in trifles. He is prolix beyond 
all example. His books are to be measured, not by 
pages, but by volumes. " Pamela " or " Sir Charles 
Grandison " would be excellent books to take with one 
to a desert island ; there we might find time to read 
them ; and it is certain they would last a long time, for 
even a marooned bishop could not read much of them 
at once. The modern reader simply despairs over 
them. He sees no reason why they should ever have 
been begun, and none whatever why they should end. 
A stupefying atmosphere of dulness seems to emanate 
from them. There is something soporific in the very 
aspect of the close-packed page. Nevertheless, few 
books have exercised so wide an influence, and have 
more completely won the praise of those whose praise 
is best worth having. Macaulay has told us in a well- 
remembered passage, how entirely he succumbed to the 
charms of " Clarissa Harlowe," and how the residents 
of an Indian station were so infected with the same 
enthusiasm that they fought for the book and read 



24 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

it with tears. It is still more astonishing to find French 
critics and novelists equally enthusiastic over Richard- 
son. Balzac and George Sand give him hearty admira- 
tion ; Diderot ranks him with the great Greek classics ; 
and — strangest thing of all — so thoroughly modern a 
writer as Alfred de Musset speaks of " Clarissa Har- 
lowe " as the first romance in the world. 

By what strange power or virtue did a man so 
essentially homely achieve this prodigious fame? The 
secret is, after all, quite simple : he was the originator 
of the Novel of Sentiment. The charge which Dickens 
brings against Defoe of an entire lack of tenderness 
and sentiment in his death of Friday is a charge which 
lies against all Defoe's work. Defoe never thinks of 
touching the fountain of tears, and probably could not 
have done so had he wished. The lack of sentiment is 
even more marked in Swift, for he takes a cruel pleas- 
ure in exposing human frailty, and has no tears even 
for the most pitiable of human miseries. Richardson 
strikes a new note. He introduces sympathy and 
pathos into English fiction. He investigates the human 
heart, not to sneer at its emotions, but to dignify them. 
His sympathy with women is remarkable. He un- 
derstands them perfectly, he reverences them, and he 
applies to them an analysis which is as delicate as it is 
acute. No wonder he found himself the idol of female 
coteries : he was the anointed Prophet of the Feminine. 
Women read his books with a kind of breathless in- 
terest which the sentimental tales of Dickens excited 
in our own day, and wrote him passionate letters, im- 
ploring him not to kill his heroine, or to save the soul of 
his hero, much as the early readers of Dickens im- 
plored him not to kill Little Nell. One of his favourite 



THE NOVEL OF SENTIMENT 25 

correspondents, Lady Bradshaigh, has vividly described 
her emotions over " Clarissa Harlowe." She wept 
copiously over the book, laid it down unable to com- 
mand her feelings, could not sleep at night for think- 
ing of it, and needed all her fortitude and the active 
sympathy of her husband to enable her to persist in 
her agonising task. 

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this 
confession. We have become inured to the sentimental 
novelist, and are on our guard against him. Our 
feelings have been outraged so often, that if we yield 
ourselves to his spell it is with deliberation, and with 
a due regard to the consequences of our weakness. 
But Richardson dealt with unsophisticated readers, 
rich in virgin emotions. He produced a kind of 
writing which had not been seen before, and it sur- 
prised the world by its novelty, as well as charmed 
it by its sympathy. Richardson thus began a move- 
ment whose effect was to be lasting. Henceforth 
fiction was to engage itself mainly with the interpreta- 
tion of sentiment, and the influence of Richardson is 
as obvious in Goethe and Rousseau as it is on our own 
long array of sentimental novelists. If any man has 
the time and patience to explore Richardson, he will 
not go unrewarded. In spite of all his prolix moral- 
isms and wearisome preachings he was an artist. The 
method of novel-writing he adopted was detestable : it 
was that most unsatisfactory of all methods, a story 
told in letters. Yet it must be confessed that, when 
the initial irritation of the method is surmounted, one 
is surprised to find how real is the grip which the 
story takes upon the imagination. The very repetition 
which the method involves gives a wonderful definite- 



26 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

ness to the characterisation. The actors in the drama 
appear again and again : not in a single part, but in a 
variety of parts ; so that in the end we know them, not 
by a solitary phase of emotion, but through and 
through. 

Sir Charles Grandison himself is an earlier edition 
of the " Egoist." He is made to reveal himself from 
every point of view, until his superb priggishness in all 
affects us with something like a sense of humour. Not 
that Richardson is ever guilty of deliberate humour: 
he takes himself much too seriously. He is a good, 
solemn, homely man, whose main object is to write 
a useful tract on the wisdom of being good and the 
extreme folly of all kinds of ill behaviour. It is this 
moral quality in Richardson which Dr. Johnson praised 
when he said that Richardson made the emotions move 
at the command of virtue. He does so far too much 
at times, for never was virtue more tiresome than in 
Sir Charles Grandison. Yet in spite of all — in spite of 
a cumbrous method, of a mind overwhelmed with copy- 
book maxims, of an acquaintance with life that never 
went beyond a narrow range of society — this respect- 
able homely bookseller was an artist, as any one of 
discrimination will readily discover by a careful study 
of the latter half of " Clarissa Harlowe." 

In the development of English fiction Richardson 
is the greatest name, because he settled the trend of 
the novel for many generations. Among those who 
were the first to imitate him were Sterne and Gold- 
smith, but each in his own way. Sterne had an un- 
doubted power of sentiment, unfortunately mixed with 
a fatal pruriency of taste. His humour and his pathos 
are equally remarkable and vital, yet both seem artifi- 



THE NOVEL OF SENTIMENT 27 

rial, owing to his lack of any real depth of feeling. 
Goldsmith, on the contrary, is exquisitely sincere, and 
his one novel, "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), is 
the finest example of the sentimental novel in English 
literature. One rarely weeps with Sterne, because 
there is ground for legitimate suspicion that Sterne 
waits for our tears only to laugh at us ; and he plays 
pranks with our emotions rather than purifies them. 
Goldsmith succeeds by his sincerity and his simplicity, 
for in him sentiment is genuine. Sterne will always 
be read by the student of literature with mixed feelings 
of admiration for his wit and dexterity and contempt 
for the man ; Goldsmith will be read by the humble 
and the wise, the cultured and the illiterate alike, with 
a genuine delight, and with a growing sense of per- 
sonal affection for the writer. 

The novel of sentiment did not take possession of 
the public mind without opposition. The eighteenth 
century was a particularly masculine age, and Richard- 
son was a feminine writer. There will always be a 
large class of readers whose taste resents the sickly 
sweetness of the sentimental novel ; and such readers 
will demand a more robust treatment of life. Just 
as in our own day we find that after a long debauch 
of sentiment the public demand a rougher and plainer 
meal, the novel of adventure ousting for a time the 
novel of emotional analysis, so, even while Richardson's 
sway was unquestioned, a counter-movement had be- 
gun. The revolt was led by Henry Fielding, whose 
story of "Joseph Andrews" (1742) was meant to be 
a burlesque on Richardson's " Pamela." Richardson 
felt the insult keenly, and described Fielding's book as 
" a lewd and ungenerous engraftment " on his own 



28 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

story. Nevertheless, it marked the rise of a new school 
of fiction. Fielding was a man wholly different from 
Richardson at every point. He had moved in a large 
world ; he knew life at first-hand ; he knew how rough 
and bitter a thing life could be, and he boldly used in 
fiction the material he had won in many hard experi- 
ences. He was, in the full sense of the term, a great 
artist. He told his stories directly, not through a cum- 
brous mass of letters, and he took pains to perfect his 
plots. He was also a master of style. No better 
model of pure, strong, nervous English can be found 
than in Fielding's pages. Nor is he destitute of sen- 
timent ; there are pages in " Amelia " which affect us 
much more deeply than anything in Richardson, 
simply because the sentiment is masculine and re- 
strained. 

With Fielding must be ranked Smollett; but it is 
method which unites them, not equality of genius. 
Smollett is more of the humourist, but only in the 
sense that his humour is broader, more farcical, and 
therefore more easily apprehended. Fielding's humour 
is subtle, and always has behind it the energy of a 
powerful thinker, who has a real philosophy of life to 
unfold. The old comparison which ranks Fielding 
with Thackeray, and Smollett with Dickens, is not 
altogether wrong. It is significant that Dickens him- 
self preferred Smollett's "Roderick Random" (1748) 
to any work of Fielding; no doubt its spirit of carica- 
ture was more agreeable to his own genius than the 
more reticent art of Fielding. But, after all, such 
comparisons are misleading, because the true student 
of any art must be prepared to admit that the spirit of 
art may manifest itself through widely divergent 



THE NOVEL OF SENTIMENT 29 

forms, and until he does this he contracts prejudices 
rather than acquires culture. Both Fielding and 
Smollett speak in a language not suited to the present 
day. " Tom Jones " has again and again incurred 
the condemnation of the fastidious. Yet we may re- 
member that our forefathers, and the best-bred women 
of an earlier time, read " Tom Jones " without the least 
sense of impropriety. Clearly Fielding is not refined — 
he paints human nature in its less pleasing aspects ; but 
neither was his age refined, and art follows rather than 
sets the standard of manners. In any case an age 
which permits Tolstoi and goes mad over Gorky can 
have little to say against Fielding and Smollett. They, 
at least, mark a great advance upon Defoe and Swift, 
and it is still a matter of question whether Coleridge 
was not right when he held Fielding to be a sound 
moralist. 

For the man who really desires to learn something 
of the origin of English fiction, it will be enough to 
know that Smollett and Fielding are first-rate forces 
in the history of its development. With them the first 
period of English fiction closes. The pioneer work 
was now done ; the foundations were well and truly 
laid. The pleasanter task now remains of seeing how 
upon these foundations there rose stage by stage the 
splendid edifice — how this new land of art was gradu- 
ally civilised, developed, and fashioned into a stable 
kingdom, becoming at last a glorious heritage, of 
which any nation and any literature might be proud. 



Ill 

FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 

Henry Fielding, born 1707, died 1754. Tobias George Smol- 
lett, born 1721, died 1771. Laurence Sterne, bom 1713, died 
1768. Oliver Goldsmith, born 1728, died 1774. Jane Austen, 
born 1775, died 1817. 

A GREAT period in the history of English fiction 
closes with Fielding and Smollett. They had 
created the novel of masculine realism, as 
Richardson had created the novel of sentiment, and 
each of these forms of fiction was to prove enduring. 
The latter half of the eighteenth century produced no 
novelist who could contest their primacy. It did, how- 
ever, produce an immense crop of fiction, much of it 
wholly feeble ; some of it execrable, both in style and 
matter; and a part of it really noteworthy because it 
marked the birth of the romantic spirit. 

The new tendency towards romance began with 
four books which appeared between the years 1761 and 
1770, viz., Macpherson's " Ossian " (1761-63), Horace 
Walpole's " Castle of Otranto " (1764), Bishop Percy's 
" Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" (1765) and 
Chatterton's "Poems" (1770). The influence of 
Macpherson, Percy, and Chatterton upon English 
poetry was decisive and far-reaching. The influence 
of Walpole upon the development of fiction was 
scarcely less remarkable. 

30 



FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 31 

Walpole, cynic, coxcomb, and dilettante as he was, 
nevertheless had a real literary gift, in spite of the 
fact that he avoided literary men, and thought that 
poets were like birds, who sang best when they were 
half starved. His conduct to Chatterton is well 
known, and admits of no excuse. Instead of recog- 
nising " The Marvellous Boy " as a fellow-crafts- 
man, working toward the same end, he denounced him 
as a forger, telling him that " all the house of forgery 
are relations," and that he who forges poems is in 
danger of forging promissory notes. It is eminently 
characteristic of Walpole that he detests men of letters 
because " they are always in earnest, and think their 
profession serious, and reverence learning." Through- 
out his long life, spent in comfort secured by a State 
pension of £2,000 per annum, which he had done noth- 
ing whatever to merit, it is not known that he stretched 
out a kindly hand to any one of the great writers who 
were making the century famous. Dr. Johnson, work- 
ing at literature at fifteen pence a day, and writing his 
fine fiction " Rasselas " in order to pay for the funeral 
of his mother; Goldsmith, producing his immortal 
" Vicar of Wakefield " under cruel conditions of pre- 
carious fortune ; Chatterton, writing a poem of several 
hundred lines for ten and sixpence, and receiving the 
same remuneration for sixteen songs, had nothing to 
expect from Walpole, who owned no kinship with 
them, and in his heart despised them. Yet Walpole, 
under all the cold polish of the cynic and the affecta- 
tions of the fop, had a genuine sense of literature, and 
may claim to have invented the romantic novel. 

Curiously enough, he who rebuked Chatterton for 
representing that his poems were the work of the monk 



32 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Rowley, recovered from the muniment chest of St. 
Mary's, Redcliff, Bristol, adopted the same method in 
publishing his fiction, and gave ground for the bitter 
imprecation of the disappointed boy : 

Walpole, I thought not I should ever see 
So mean a heart as thine hath proved to be; 
Thou, who in luxury nurst, beholdst with scorn 
The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn 
Asks thy high favour. Thou mayst call me cheat. 
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit 
Who wrote " Otranto " ? 

The full title of Walpole's book is " The Castle of 
Otranto, a Gothic Story; translated by William Mar- 
shall, Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio, 
Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, 
Otranto." It abounds in absurdities, such as helmets 
that fall without visible agency, portraits which emit 
sighs, and blood that falls from the nose of a statue ; 
yet it is remarkable for a powerful, if crude, imagina- 
tion. The element of the supernatural is never man- 
aged with the plausibility of Defoe; Walpole's object is 
merely to create terror by devices which may be called 
mechanical. Yet there can be no doubt that terror 
is created, and beneath all the absurdities of the book 
there is a genuine spirit of mediaeval romance which 
was to find many imitators and interpreters. 

For the remarkable thing about Walpole's story is 
not in the attempt he makes to represent the super- 
natural, but in his effort to reproduce the spirit of 
medisevalism. If there was one thing about which 
Walpole was in earnest, it was his genuine admira- 
tion for medisevalism. His villa at Strawberry Hill 



FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 33 

was a pasteboard imitation of a Gothic castle, which 
he himself described as a bauble " set in enamelled 
meadows in filigree hedges." He was an eager col- 
lector of armour, china, old pictures, carvings, and so 
forth, in a day when the taste for connoisseurship was 
scarcely born. His book is a reflection of these tastes, 
which excited only contempt among his contempora- 
ries. To them he appeared a trifler ; yet he was not 
trivial. It was his singular destiny to create a new 
taste in the public corresponding to his own, to turn 
the attention of men of letters from the commonplace 
life of the eighteenth century to the varied and won- 
derful life of the fifteenth century, and the romances 
of Scott, the poetry of Coleridge, and the Oxford 
Movement of Newman may all be traced to the in- 
fluence of Walpole. 

The greatest of Walpole's imitators were Mrs. Rad- 
cliffe, Maturin, and Beckford. Mrs. Radcliffe, in her 
famous "Mysteries of Udolpho " (1794), has carried 
the art of creating terror to a point never reached by 
Walpole. There is the same kind of mechanism, mys- 
terious vaults, pictures, panels, and trapdoors ; but 
there is a new element — the creation of mysterious 
persons, stained with unknown crimes and vices, who 
inspire fear by something supernatural or profoundly 
melancholy in their aspect. " There was something 
in his physiognomy extremely singular, and that can- 
not easily be defined. It bore the traces of many pas- 
sions, which seemed to have fixed the features they no 
longer animated." We can readily discern the genesis 
of Byron's " Lara " in such a description, and of many 
another mysterious personage in melodramatic fiction. 
There is also in all Mrs. Radcliffe's romances a sins:u- 



34 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

lar sensitiveness to the larger aspects of nature, which, 
perhaps, was due to the reading of " Ossian." Few 
writers have utilised the gloom of impenetrable forests, 
the suggestions of wild sunsets or melancholy dawns, 
the terror or magnificence of tempests, with more 
effect. 

Maturin pursues the same method, but he relies less 
on violent mechanism to produce the sense of terror ; 
he suggests terror rather than describes it. It is he 
who has created the truly great figure of Melmoth, 
which fascinated the imagination of so great a writer 
as Balzac — Melmoth, the man who has purchased im- 
mortality at a price so terrible that its secret is in- 
communicable. 

Beckford's name lives in fiction by his one romance 
of " Vathek " (1786). It opens with a passage which 
will strike the modern reader as absurd : Vathek's 

figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry one 
of his eyes became so terrible that no person could bear to 
behold it, and the wretch upon whom it was fixed instantly 
fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of 
depopulating his dominions, and making his palace desolate, 
he but rarely gave way to his anger. 

Nevertheless, the book rises at times to grandeur, 
though it scarcely deserves the praise that has been 
awarded it. as " the finest Oriental tale written by an 
Englishman." Some of its descriptions are intrinsic- 
ally impressive — as, for instance, the description of 
Vathek's tower (Beckford's own passion for building 
towers amounted to a mania) : 

His pride arrived at its height when, having ascended for 
the first time the eleven thousand stairs of his tower, he cast 



FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 35 

his eyes below and beheld men not larger than pismires, 
mountains than shells, and cities than beehives. The idea 
which such an elevation inspired of his own grandeur com- 
pletely bewildered him; he was almost ready to adore himself, 
till, lifting his eyes upward, he saw the stars as high above 
him as they appeared when he stood on the surface of the 
earth. 

The close of the book, with its famous description 
of the Hall of Eblis, reaches something nearly akin 
to sublimity: 

They reached, at length, a hall of great extent, and covered 
with a lofty dome, around which appeared fifty portals of 
bronze, secured with as many fastenings of iron ; a funereal 
gloom prevailed over the whole scene ; here, upon two beds 
of incorruptible cedar, lay recumbent the fleshless forms of 
the pre-Adamite kings, who had been monarchs of the whole 
earth . . . each holding his right hand motionless on his 
heart; at their feet were inscribed the events of their several 
reigns, their power, their pride, and their crimes. 

The sense of terror inspired by such a scene as 
this is very different from that inspired by the gross 
machinery of Walpole's " Castle of Otranto " ; it is 
legitimate, as his was illegitimate ; it is intellectually 
impressive, as his was intellectually absurd. 

The success of this new form of fiction was im- 
mense. It seemed as though the vital and strenuous 
work of the earlier novelists was entirely forgotten. 
The public taste grew by what it fed on, and number- 
less romances appeared, in which no attempt was made 
to paint any single aspect of human life with fidelity or 
truth. The more horrible and blood-curdling the tale, 
and the more abnormal and monstrous the actors in it, 
the more certain was the author of success. Yet it 



36 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

must be remembered that, however crudely and 
coarsely this new romantic spirit expressed itself, it 
possessed the secret of a genuine literary impulse. 
" Monk " Lewis — so called from the immense success 
of his story "The Monk" (1795) — deals in crude 
horror with a hand much less scrupulous than Mrs. 
Radcliffe's ; but he also contrives to resuscitate the 
spirit of feudalism, and it was this element in his work 
which arrested the attention of Scott. In later litera- 
ture Hawthorne, Poe, and Stevenson have been prac- 
titioners in the same school as Maturin. Mrs. Shelley's 
" Frankenstein " and Shelley's own boyish romance of 
" Zastrozzi " belong to the same movement. Yet upon 
the whole it must be said that the novel of terror has 
enjoyed but a precarious success in English litera- 
ture. Now and then a writer of great genius has been 
able to handle his theme with supreme art, as in the 
" Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde " and the " Thrawn Janet " 
of Stevenson ; but as a rule the writer of the novel of 
terror fails through extravagance of conception or 
puerility of invention. The best fruit of the move- 
ment is not found in prose literature at all, but in 
poetry, and particularly in " Christabel " and " The 
Ancient Mariner " of Coleridge. 

In the meantime other influences were at work on 
the development of the English novel. While Fielding 
painted life with uncompromising realism, and Mrs. 
Radcliffe created romances which had no relation to 
life, there were others who had begun to see that 
fiction afforded an excellent vehicle for the expression 
of theories and ideas. The nascent influence of the 
French Revolution began to be felt. Rousseau had 
sown the mind of Europe with the seed of new truth 



FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 37 

and untruth ; he had accused the whole social order ; 
he had counselled a return to nature, by which he 
meant that man in his natural condition was a much 
worthier creature than he appeared under the artifi- 
cial conditions of an elaborate social system. Rous- 
seau had also utilised prose fiction for the expression 
of his doubtful gospel, and his example was con- 
tagious. A considerable list might be prepared of late 
eighteenth-century novels in which some portion of 
the revolutionary teaching of Rousseau is expressed 
but the greatest exponent of these ideas is unquestion- 
ably William Godwin (1756 — 1836). Just as some of 
our most popular modern writers have achieved fame 
by the interpretation of the religious doubts or social 
theories which were in the air, so Godwin deliberately 
used fiction for the interpretation of what was essen- 
tially a new political gospel. Godwin's creed was that 
the extension of liberty meant the decay of vice ; that 
the vices of men were not inherent, but were the re- 
sult of bad institutions ; that among the bad institutions 
which produced human misery, and prevented human 
perfectibility, were the throne, the church, the army, 
and the law ; and that therefore these institutions 
should be abolished. With these theories we are not 
concerned, but the remarkable thing is that Godwin 
should have sought to express them in fiction. His 
" Adventures of Caleb Williams " is a fine novel, which 
has escaped oblivion by its real art ; and if it still merits 
attention, it is not because of its philosophy, but be- 
cause of its art. Novelists who write with a purpose 
may still consult Godwin with advantage, for no writer 
of fiction affords a better example of how to combine 
a serious aim with that genuine power of characterisa- 



38 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

tion without which the novel with a purpose is noth- 
ing better than a ponderous tract. 

But, after all, the real aim of the novel should be the 
interpretation of life ; and to this plain work of inter- 
preting life, without bias of creed, whether religious or 
political, the novel was bound to return. Miss Bur- 
ney's famous novel "Evelina" (1778) marks this re- 
turn. She brought to her task a mind of singular 
vivacity, an eye characterised by a power of acutest ob- 
servation, and a heart capable of the intensest feeling. 
The claim has been made for her that she invented the 
novel of domestic satire, and it is a just claim. Yet it 
is rather as a forerunner of a yet greater woman of 
genius, whose supreme power lay in domestic satire, 
that Miss Burney is remembered. Jane Austen, born 
in 1775, at Steventon, is one of the true immortals of 
English literature, yet she found no easy road to fame. 
Few novelists have written three great novels without 
the prospect of publishing one of them, yet this was 
Jane Austen's fate. And when we remember that all 
the great names we have already mentioned are the 
names of persons moving more or less in a large world, 
cheered by the praise or stimulated by the opposition 
of their contemporaries, and drawing their knowledge 
of life from ample sources, perhaps the most extraordi- 
nary characteristic of Jane Austen's life is its singular 
isolation. 

Jane Austen had no literary adviser, and indeed 
knew no one even remotely connected with the world 
of letters. She read " The Spectator," but did not like 
it, and thought it coarse. For Cowper and Crabbe 
she had an abiding love, and this is not surprising, 
since we find so much in her own nature akin to theirs. 



FROM FIELDING TO JANE AUSTEN 39 

Not that she had any of Cowper's melancholy — a per- 
son of more cheerful vivacity never breathed. But she 
had Cowper's happy faculty of discovering delight in 
simple and common things, and she gathered with un- 
failing diligence " the harvest of a quiet eye." She had 
a touch also of Crabbe's unflinching realism, but with- 
out his pathos and compassion. She strikes no deep 
chords, moves us with no deep passion, thrills us with 
no great thoughts or poignant emotions. But neither 
Crabbe nor Cowper, nor any one else, we might almost 
add, could paint still life with a precision and charm 
such as hers. Her highest claim as an artist is that 
she inaugurated the novel of still life. 

In a day when people wept over the mock pathos 
of Sterne, and were thrilled with the sensationalism of 
Mrs. Radcliffe, it needed an unusual degree of courage, 
of resolute self-poise, and of detachment of mind to 
accomplish this task, and for the development of these 
qualities solitude was necessary. And, to the discern- 
ing, there is genuine dignity and pathos in the picture 
of this quiet, cheerful, clear-eyed woman, far away 
from the great interests of life, sitting down to write 
books which no publisher was to venture on for years, 
and yet so absolutely assured of the Tightness of her 
method, and so full of the quiet enjoyment of her own 
work, that her patience is never wearied, her temper 
never soured, her brightness never dulled. She wrought 
for pure love of her work, and without thinking much 
about it. She wrote at her little desk by the sunny 
window, carefully . covering up her papers when a 
stranger entered, and breathing no word to any one 
outside the family circle of the nature of her pursuits. 
Sometimes she wrote amid the chatter of conversa- 



40 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

tion, and found it no detriment. She wrote on, un- 
conscious of her own genius, and content that no one 
should recognise her as an unusual person. Before 
her, as she sat at her desk, all the little world she knew 
lived and moved, and it was all the world she wanted. 
She was content to love and be loved, and did not ask 
for praise. Perhaps public praise would have spoiled 
her; it was best that so delicate a gift as hers should 
mature itself in silence and seclusion. Literature was 
not her life, but her pastime ; had the making of books 
been the real bread-winning purpose of her life we 
should still have had a great writer, but not the Jane 
Austen we know. One can fancy that such books as 
hers could only grow by slow processes of crystallisa- 
tion, in the stillest of atmospheres, and that any en- 
largement of life which might have come from con- 
tact with a tumultuous world would also have meant 
the arrest of her genius and the deterioration of her 
style. But, however this may be, there can be no doubt 
of the greatness of her work, though it is a kind 
of work too true and delicate ever to be appre- 
ciated at its real worth by minds destitute of critical 
discrimination. 



IV 

JANE AUSTEN, AND THE NOVEL 
OF SOCIAL COMEDY 

Jane Austen, bom at the Rectory, Steventon, Hampshire, 
December 16th, 1775. Published four stories anonymously 
during her lifetime, vis., " Sense and Sensibility," 1811; 
"Pride and Prejudice," 1813; "Mansfield Park," 1814; 
"Emma," 1816. Died July 18th, 1817, at Winchester. "North- 
anger Abbey" and "Persuasion" were published in 1818, 
when her authorship of the whole six novels was first 
acknowledged. 

JANE AUSTEN stands for so much in the develop- 
ment of English fiction that the nature of her 
genius and influence demands careful considera- 
tion. " Pride and Prejudice " was written when she 
was only one-and-twenty ; her last book, " Sense and 
Sensibility," in 1797-8. Two of her best-known 
novels, " Northanger Abbey " and " Persuasion," were 
published after her death. Her entire literary life was 
comprised in the twenty-one years between 1786 and 
1817. 

It has often been said that an original writer has to 
create the taste by which he is appreciated ; it may be 
remembered also that the original writer often uncon- 
sciously discerns an altered or a new taste in the public 
before the public itself is quite aware of the change. 
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the 
closing decades of the eighteenth century was the rapid 

41 



42 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

change of literary taste. The tone of society had 
altered. Morals were perhaps not less corrupt than in 
the days of Defoe, but sentiment had become more re- 
fined. The common life of the time was still coarse, 
and abounded in the abominations which Hogarth has 
exposed with a truth and realism unrivalled in art ; 
but there was also a genuine movement towards a more 
delicate apprehension of life. The brutality of Swift 
had become disgusting to the new generation ; the 
frank realism of Defoe and even the masculine satire 
of Fielding were scarcely less palatable. There was 
room therefore for a new kind of fiction, which should 
be a comedy of life and manners. 

Among novelists Jane Austen ranks as a supreme 
mistress of comedy. Macaulay has boldly compared 
her with Shakespeare, and Mr. Goldwin Smith has 
said that " the hand which drew Miss Bates, though it 
could not have drawn Lady Macbeth, could have 
drawn Dame Quickly, or the nurse in ' Romeo and 
Juliet.' " She brought to her task of social comedy a 
singular combination of rare gifts — a wit and satire of 
wonderful delicacy, a mind of great penetration, a style 
absolutely pellucid and effortless. No novelist has 
ever been more thoroughly an artist both in her atti- 
tude towards her own work and in her respect for her 
own limitations. She is so impersonal in her attitude 
that one may seek in vain for any trace of her own 
opinions or thoughts in her writings. Her respect for 
her own limitations is equally remarkable. " I must 
keep to my own style," she says, " and go on in my own 
way ; and though I may never succeed again in that, I 
am convinced that I should totally fail in any other." 
Within her own limits she comes as near perfection as 



THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY 43 

any human genius can, and those who object to the 
material and scale of her art should recollect that a 
dewdrop may be as perfect a creation as a star, a 
grass-blade may be fashioned with as high a skill as the 
most wonderful of tropic flowers. 

In order justly to appreciate Jane Austen, the first 
duty of the reader is, then, quite obvious; it is to re-' 
spect the limitations of her art, as she herself did. It 
is foolish to expect from her what she does not profess 
to give, such as romance, or high-flown sentiment, or 
the tragedy of great passions. She painted the world 
she knew ; her claim is that she not only painted it with 
fidelity, but with sympathy ; with a lively sense of its 
blemishes, and with an ever-present satire, no doubt ; 
but also with a true insight into its redeeming pieties 
and virtues. It is not her fault that romance and senti- 
ment and large passions are not found in her pages; 
they were not found in the world she knew. 

Like the Brontes, Jane Austen was born and bred in 
an English parsonage, and lived in a by-road far from 
the main roads of life. But the Brontes had a far bet- 
ter opportunity than Jane Austen. They at least lived 
among a people in whom the primitive passions were 
strong and very imperfectly suppressed. The country 
which lay at the back of Haworth was as wild as the 
people, and had a primeval beauty and savageness of 
its own. One could conceive of great dramas, full of 
intense love and passion and revenge, being enacted 
on such a stage ; there is a suggestion of the Titanic in 
the very scenery. But Jane Austen was born into a 
world of unredeemed dulness. Everything around her 
was prim and trim and proper. Instead of thunder- 
scarred hills there are leafy parks and smooth lawns. 



44 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

The people who move across these strictly regulated 
Edens have the unconscious self-poise of very proper 
persons ; they love with discretion and sobriety ; they 
are disappointed in love, but take it calmly; and even 
in the very height of a successful passion are quite 
capable of discussing, with a suitable attention to ele- 
gance of phrase and the four per cents, (they were 
four in those days), their marriage settlements. What 
material could be less likely to provide a great novelist 
with the plot and movement necessary to a great novel 
than this tiresome mediocrity of eighteenth-century 
village life? 

Yet it was from this material that Jane Austen has 
contrived to extract stories which have survived for a 
century, and seem likely to endure to quite unprophe- 
sied generations. The means by which this success has 
been achieved are quite clear to any one who will study 
her works with even casual attention. She had the 
clearest eyes that ever detected the foibles of human / 
character. The very limitation of her range of vision 
explains its intensity. She accurately described her 
method when she spoke of herself as a miniature 
painter. Broad and tumultuous effects she not merely 
cannot achieve — she dislikes them. But she can lay 
touch upon touch with an infinite patience and fineness, 
until the finished picture is as near perfection as one 
can well conceive. It may perhaps be but miniature- 
painting — a work of art wrought upon three inches of 
ivory; nevertheless, to write "Pride and Prejudice" 
demands as fine a genius as the production of " Ivan- 
hoe " or " Kenilworth." This no one knew better than 
Sir Walter Scott, who, after reading " Pride and Prej- 
udice " for the third time, says : " The big bow-wow 



THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY 45 

strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the 
exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace 
things and characters interesting from the truth of 
the description and the sentiment is denied me." It is 
this exquisite touch which Jane Austen possesses, and 
in a degree that is unrivalled. She has successfully 
contrived the apotheosis of the commonplace, and 
clothed dulness with distinction. 

In Jane Austen it is the very naturalness of the 
picture which makes it seem uninteresting. Without 
perhaps saying it, or even analysing our thoughts so 
far as to express it, we all of us favour a little exag- 
geration in art. We do not object to emphasis; on the 
contrary, it attracts us. A bit of clear blue sky and 
greyish-blue down is not enough for us ; its simplicity 
seems to us commonplace, and its truth foolish. And 
in the same way a book that is no more nor less than 
an exact reflection of life, which does not attempt to 
group people with an eye to stage-effect, or to put 
speeches into their mouths which invite applause, re- 
pels us by its very fidelity. Beyond doubt many read- 
ers will be similarly affected by Jane Austen. But 
upon reflection they will begin to discover how won- 
derful a gift this is, which can gaze on life with so 
unembarrassed an eye and report its vision with so 
perfect an exactitude. After a while the bit of blue 
sky and grey down charm us. The quiet and simple 
tones of colour soothe and delight us. 

The genius of Jane Austen lies in this perfect and 
even severe simplicity. Her characters evolve them- 
selves without any aid of dramatic episodes. Her plot 
is as natural and inevitable as a problem in mathe- 
matics. Everything is fitted together with the most 



16 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

delicate contrivance, with the art that effectually con- 
ceals art. From first to last the atmosphere is exqui- 
sitely lucid, the style distinct and firm, the figures, in 
spite of the old-fashioned stiffness of their phrase and 
gait, so vital that they are more real to us than many 
of the people we have dined with. We feel, not that 
we have read a book, but that we have been magically 
transported into the eighteenth century, and have 
breathed its air and lived its life. 

Like all great artists, Jane Austen is thus in a sense 
an historian as well as an artist. Her picture of life 
and manners in the close of the eighteenth century is 
not less vivid than the picture drawn by Defoe and 
Fielding of the life and manners of the earlier part of 
the century, and as a contribution to our historical 
knowledge is probably much truer, because it is more 
widely representative. It is often deplored that pro- 
fessional historians, who are capable enough of de- 
scribing the pageantries of a court, the contests of 
politicians, the sumptuous lives of the rich, or even the 
miserable conditions of life among the disinherited 
and the criminal, appear incapable of producing any 
accurate picture of the average kind of life lived by 
those distinguished by neither great wealth nor great 
poverty, by neither uncommon learning nor uncom- 
mon ignorance. Jane Austen gives us incidentally just 
the sort of details about the lives of average people 
which the historian omits and the sociologist demands. 
We can leave to the historian the Napoleonic drama 
which was played out amid the terror and applause of 
Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth century. 
If there is no echo of its trampling hosts in the pages 
of Jane Austen, there is something equally valuable to 



THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY 47 

us who survey the whole period with infinite curiosity ; 
there is a picture of England itself, the England of the 
dull average, from whose stubhorn pride was evolved 
the force that brought the drama to a close. Yet it is 
an England that seems so far away as to appear almost 
unrecognisable. The heroines of Jane Austen's pages 
travel by post-chaise, think fifty miles a prodigious 
journey, and an excursion to Derbyshire a serious ad- 
venture. Gracechurch Street is a locality where a 
wealthy merchant may fitly reside ; but the proud 
Darcy, who has an estate in Derbyshire, would never 
think of penetrating so plebeian a neighbourhood. 
Clergymen speak with bated breath and whispering 
humbleness of their patrons, and livings are left by will 
to family favourites. People have a way of talking like 
copybooks ; and the proprieties, especially in relation to 
women, are defined and strict. It is looked upon as a 
monstrous thing that Elizabeth Bennet should walk 
three miles on a country road, and her critics 
exclaim : 

To walk three miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in 
dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by it? 
It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited inde- 
pendence, a most country-town indifference to decorum. She 
really looked almost wild ! 

And how far away does that world seem which talked 
of this alarming indiscretion with the didactic gravity 
of this sentence : 

I admire the activity of your benevolence, but every im- 
pulse of feeling should be guided by reason ; and, in my opin- 
ion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is re- 
quired. 



48 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

It may perhaps be an inducement to many who pro- 
fess themselves unable to read Jane Austen to be 
reminded that she is one of the truest humorists and 
keenest wits who ever handled the English language. 
Her pages sparkle with touches of wit and irony, so 
keen and just that they are a perpetual delight to any 
one who is even moderately equipped with the literary 
sense. Is there, in the whole range of English fiction, 
an absurder figure than Mr. Collins, in " Pride and 
Prejudice"? He is a clergyman, and this is how he 
speaks of his patroness : 

Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many people, he 
knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her. 
She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gen- 
tleman; she made not the smallest objection to his joining in 
the society of the neighbourhood, nor to his leaving his parish 
occasionally for a week or two to visit his relations. 

He expresses to Lady Catherine his regret that the 
delicate state of her daughter's health prevents her 
entering society, which event 

has deprived the British Court of its brightest ornament. 
Her ladyship seemed pleased with the idea ; and you may im- 
agine that I am happy on every occasion to offer these delicate 
compliments which are always acceptable to ladies. 

The denseness of Mr. Collins is as great as his snob- 
bishness. When he is asked if these delicate little 
compliments which are " acceptable to ladies " proceed 
from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of 
previous study, he gravely replies that 

they arise chiefly from what is passing at the time; and al- 
though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arrang- 



THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY 49 

ing such elegant little compliments as may be adapted to 
ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an 
air as possible. 

When he offers marriage to Elizabeth and is rejected, 
he coolly responds that she should remember that in 
spite of her manifold attractions it is by no means 
certain that another offer of marriage will be made 
her. 

As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in 
your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your 
wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual 
practice of elegant females. 

The lady to whom he proposes three days later is 
by no means an " elegant female," but that is of no 
consequence, since he is under strict orders from Lady 
Catherine to marry at once, and his holiday, granted 
for that purpose, terminates on Saturday. This lady — 
Miss Lucas — 

perceived him from an upper window as he walked toward 
the house, and instantly set out to meet him accidentally in 
the lane. 

She is eager to marry him at once, because 

the stupidity with which he was favoured by nature must guard 
his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish 
for its continuance. 

When this strange pair are married, Lady Catherine is 
graciously pleased to show -great interest in them, and 
even to ask them to dinner when she has no other 
company. Nay, more — 



50 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

now and then they are honoured with a call from her lady- 
ship, and nothing that was passing in the room escaped her oh- 
servation during these visits. She examined into their em- 
ployments, looked at their work, and advised them to do it 
differently; found fault with the arrangement of the furniture, 
or detected the household in negligence ; and if she accepted 
any refreshment, seemed to do it only for the sake of finding 
out that Mrs. Collins' joints of meat were too large for her 
family. 

Surely in such pictures as these there is not merely 
truth and life, but that saving salt of humour which, 
more than anything else, preserves the literature of a 
past age from oblivion. 

The comparison between Jane Austen and Shake- 
speare, suggested by both Macaulay and Mr. Goldwin 
Smith, is ingenious, and, within the limits drawn by 
these great critics, just; but Thackeray affords us a 
closer comparison. The spirit of Jane Austen is en- 
tirely the spirit of Thackeray. 

There is the same criticism of life; the hatred of 
shams, and the quick irony that pierces and exposes 
them ; the delightful turns of expression, the caustic 
word which is not readily forgotten, and the humour, 
half genial and half sardonic, by which the facts of 
life are illumined. The only difference is that, while 
Thackeray was really angry with snobs, Jane Austen 
is too conscious of their absurdities to be irritated over 
them. Thackeray can be very bitter ; but Jane Austen 
gives her most caustic criticisms a flavour of humour 
which robs them of ill-nature. When it becomes a 
question of pathos, Thackeray out-distances Jane Aus- 
ten completely; but probably that is due simply to the 
fact that in 1850 writers did not deem it necessary to 
disguise their tenderer feelings, and in 181 1 they did. 



THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY 51 

A woman who carefully concealed the fact that she 
was a writer, and wished only to be loved and trusted 
for her womanliness, would not be likely to uncover 
the depths of her heart even in books. Jane Austen 
was trained in the tradition that regarded any display 
of deep feeling as unwomanly, and the real reticence 
and modesty of her nature made the expression of 
pathos as difficult as it was undesirable. But on her 
humour she put no restraint save that of kindliness, 
and keen as is her irony it is impossible to accuse her 
of cynicism. In this also she resembles Thackeray, 
who concealed beneath the assumed savageness of the 
satirist the softest and most human of hearts. 

But it would be a gross error to suppose that Jane 
Austen is incapable of pathos or fine sentiment. Who 
can create a true comedy of life without at times 
touching those deeper springs of romance and passion 
that underlie even the humblest existence? 

Narrow as were the limits which Jane Austen set for 
herself, there are, nevertheless, moments of fine in- 
tensity, when her feelings master her method — as, for 
example, when she speaks of the love-musings of Anne 
Elliot, as she walks the streets of Bath, and says that 
they were enough almost " to spread purification and 
perfume all the way." For herself, she was content 
to live a life that never knew the agitations of passion. 
Her recompense was in the steadiness and firmness of 
those home-ties which held her fast to the quiet hearts 
that loved her and knew her worth. The tenderest 
unselfishness characterised her life from beginning to 
end. When she was very ill, and near death, she would 
not use the sofa — sofas in those days were rare — be- 
cause she was afraid if she did so her mother might 



52 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

scruple to use it. She made shift with a couple of 
chairs, and persuaded her mother that they were more 
comfortable. It is a little touch, but a tender and 
pathetic one, and it shows the woman. In one of her 

last letters she says, " God bless you, my dear E . 

If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as 
I have been." And she goes on to say that she feels 
utterly unworthy of so much love. When the end 
came, one of her attendants asked her if she wanted 
anything. " Nothing but death," she replied, and these 
were her last words. She was buried quietly in Win- 
chester Cathedral, and in the " Annual Register " for 
the year there is no mention of her death. To-day every 
summer brings numerous pilgrims to her grave, and 
her latest and most brilliant critic has said, " On her 
was bestowed, though in a humble form, the gift which 
has been bestowed on Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
Scott, and a few others — the gift of creative power." 



V 
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 

Walter Scott, born August 15th, r/71, in Edinburgh. " Wa- 
verley," published July, 1814; "Guy Manncring," February, 
1815; "The Antiquary," May, 1816; "The Black Dwarf" and 
"Old Mortality," December, 1816; "Rob Roy" and "The 
Heart of Midlothian," 1818; "The Bride of Lammermoor" 
and "The Legend of Montrose," 1819; "Ivanhoe," "The 
Monastery" and "The Abbot," 1820; " Kenilworih" and 
"The Pirate," 1821; "The Fortunes of Nigel," 1822; " Pev- 
eril of the Peak," " Qucntin Durzuard," and "St. Ronan's 
Well," 1823; "Red Gauntlet," 1824; "The Betrothed" and 
" The Talisman," 1825; " Woodstock," 1826; " The Two 
Drovers," "The Highland Widow," "The Surgeon's Daugh- 
ter," and "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1828; "Anne of Geier- 
stcin," 1828; "Count Robert of Paris" and "Castle Danger- 
ous," 1831. Scott acknowledged the authorship of the " Wa- 
verley Novels" in 1826. He died in 1832. 

IN Lockhart's " Life of Scott " there is a vivid and 
picturesque description of Scott's removal from 
Ashestiel to Abbotsford in 1812, drawn by the 
hand of the master himself. Scott tells us that his 
neighbours 

have been delighted with the procession of my furniture, in 
which old swords, bows, targets, and lances have made a 
very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommo- 
dated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient 
border fame ; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bear- 
ing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this 
caravan, attended by a dozen ragged, rosy peasant children, 

53 



54 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, grey- 
hounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have 
furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded 
me of one of the gypsy groups of Callott upon their march. 

In another letter he tells us : 

Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all descrip- 
tion ; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in na- 
ture, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare- 
headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys. 

In this spirited sketch the temperament of Scott is 
clearly revealed. We realise at once that he was 
infected with the same enthusiasm for mediaevalism 
that was the most positive feature of Walpole's char- 
acter, and that he had a real passion for country life, 
as authentic as that which distinguished Rousseau. 
Great men, and even the greatest, inherit tendencies as 
well as create them ; and although there was in Scott 
a certain massive manliness and good sense, an almost 
distinctive sanity as it were, yet the double strain of 
Walpole and Rousseau met in him. Scott's passion for 
accumulating " old swords, bows, targets, and lances " 
is indistinguishable from Walpole's elaborate connois- 
seurship except that it has a manlier basis. Straw- 
berry Hill and Abbotsford are creations of the same 
craze for medievalism — each a parody, each an impos- 
ture, each a fanaticism. As for Rousseau, the most 
genuine thing about him was his real delight in Nature, 
and his real preference for country life. When he 
tells us that he is never conscious of true felicity except 
in the quiet of rural scenery, he speaks with an enthu- 
siasm which creates conviction. Scott, when he says 
he thinks he should have died if he had not seen the 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 55 

heather once a year, speaks much as Rousseau did. His 
love for Abbots ford was quite as much love for its 
quiet scenery as for the expensive Gothic toy he had 
erected there. It was from this double tendency that 
the Waverley Novels were to be created. Feudalism 
and Nature are the two notes which Scott strikes with 
extraordinary effect. The man who was to write the 
Waverley Novels could not be better depicted than in 
this vivid sketch of the flitting from Ashestiel to Ab- 
botsford ; the ancient helmet with the family of turkeys 
in it describes his temperament and is the symbol of 
his genius. 

Readers of Scott's Life will at once admit the truth 
of these observations. He had no interest in the rise 
of industrialism which marked the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, and for the corresponding rise of 
democracy he had a positive aversion. The feudal 
ideal of life not only appealed to his imagination, but 
expressed his convictions. The part in life he most 
desired to play was that of the head or chieftain of a 
clan, surrounded by many retainers, united in his serv- 
ice by a genuine loyalty. The building of Abbotsford, 
that tragic folly as it proved to be, was, after all, the 
legitimate expression of the same ideal. It was an at- 
tempt to revive the old patriarchal dignity of a feudal 
household. There is this fundamental difference to be 
observed between the historical fictions of Scott and the 
historical novels of all other English authors — they 
were the real expression of his own nature, not a 
laboured effort to depict the past. From childhood his 
mind had been steeped in the old border poetry and 
romance. There was not a ruined tower nor a solitary 
border glen with whose legend he was not acquainted. 



56 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

The pasl throbbed in his blood. It was a perfectly 
natural thing that he should seek to gather retainers 
round him, and that he should build Abbotsford. It 
was equally a natural and inevitable thing that, when 
he had once conceived the idea of writing prose fiction, 
he should write romantic fiction. 

This is a point to be insisted on, because it explains 
the immense superiority of Scott as a writer of the 
historical novel. There are many English writers who 
have produced fine historical novels, comparable with, 
and even superior to, the best of Scott. Charles Reade 
has done so in his " Cloister and the Hearth." Thack- 
eray in his " Esmond," Shorthouse in his " John Ingle- 
sant." Taken separately and on their own merits, 
either of these novels may be ranked with the best of 
Scott, and there are many of us who, if we had the 
courage to be quite truthful, would assert that Scott 
has never equalled either Reade's or Thackeray's mas- 
terpieces. But there is this essential difference — great 
as these works are, yet they are manifestly the result of 
immense labour and erudition. They do not represent 
the real bent of their author's genius. They are excur- 
sions into a strange land of art, executed with consum- 
mate skill and genius, which surprise us in the same 
way that we should be surprised if Isaac Newton had 
gone upon the stage and acted Hamlet, or Shakespeare 
had published an essay on logarithms. In spite of all 
the wonderful merits of " Esmond," the real Thackeray 
is expressed in " Vanity Fair," and the same thing is 
true of Reade's " Hard Cash " in relation to " The 
Cloister and the Hearth." Such books are tours de 
force. They simply serve to show us that a man of 
genius, by dint of labour, may write almost any kind 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 57 

of book he likes, and write it not only well, but much 
better than some other man who has made this par- 
ticular kind of book his specialty. But Scott writes the 
historical novel simply because there is no other kind 
of novel which he could write. He had no need to 
cram his subject, as Reade did, by enormous labours 
in the Bodleian before he wrote " The Cloister and the 
Hearth " ; it is native to him. He writes not only with 
fulness of knowledge on any given period, but with 
that instinctive Tightness of touch which comes from 
immersion in the spirit of the period. He may occa- 
sionally fail in accuracy as Reade could not have 
failed, but he never fails in that higher kind of truth 
which gives a firm artistic reality to past history. In 
a word, he brings much more than learning, much 
more than patient investigation, to his task — he brings 
his entire personality ; and this is the reason why his 
superiority remains unchallenged. 

The building of Abbotsford, which has been so much 
condemned by practical men as the one unpractical 
thing in Scott's life, is in itself a striking proof of this 
criticism. Many men of letters have had curious 
private tastes ; one collects pipes, another stamps, an- 
other (a Zola, for example) old furniture. One does 
not find, however, that Zola's love for mediaeval furni- 
,ture meant that he was a medievalist. It was a pleas- 
ant pastime, a mild extravagance ; when he built a 
house it was an ordinary modern house, and when he 
took up his pen he was still a realist. Scott's case was 
wholly different. He is not to be ranked with the 
dilettante who takes up the search for old oak and 
armour as a pastime, and still less with the suddenly 
enriched man of letters who wishes to build himself a 



58 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

lordly pleasure-house, and get to himself honour as a 
social magnate. Abbotsford was a passion, not a pas- 
time. No more sagacious and practical man than Scott 
ever lived, so far as the ordinary affairs of life were 
concerned; but on one side of his character he was as 
mad as Don Quixote. The moment he breathed the 
air of old romance his business sagacity deserted him, 
and he was off upon his Rosinante to the fields of quite 
incredible adventure. Not to recognise this strain of 
Quixote in Scott is not to know him at all. It is the 
strain which produced his novels. Abbotsford is the 
most valuable commentary upon the novels that exists. 
It is the proof, we may say, that the writing of romance 
was not a trade with Scott, but a fundamental necessity 
of his' character and genius. 

It is one of the most pleasant traditions of Scott's 
authorship that no one would have guessed that he 
was an author by observation of his daily life. He 
wrote rapidly, and with such perfect ease, that in his 
best period his literary work was less a labour than a 
pastime to him. No one saw him in his study, and, 
for obvious reasons connected with the mystery with 
which he chose to veil the authorship of the Waverley 
Novels, no one heard him discuss his books. The man 
known to the world, and to the crowd of guests who 
shared the lavish hospitality of Abbotsford, was essen- 
tially the man we see migrating from Ashestiel, sur- 
rounded by admiring dependents, interested in all the 
details of country life, and apparently absorbed in the 
practical management of his estate. We must not, 
however, allow ourselves to be imposed upon by this 
picture of Scott as a gentleman at ease. However 
Scott came by his erudition, there is no doubt of the 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 59 

erudition. He sometimes wrote carelessly because he 
wrote in haste, but he never wrote ignorantly. His 
antiquarian knowledge was profound. He knew not 
merely the general features of any period he chose to 
describe, but he was familiar with its smallest details. 
His passion for detail is so great that it often becomes 
pedantic. He is apt to overload his narrative with 
information which is of much more interest to the 
antiquarian than the general reader. In most of his 
books the commencement is heavy and tedious simply 
because he is at pains to picture the conditions of the 
period in which the story is cast. But it is this very 
wealth of detail which in the long run is Scott's strong- 
est weapon, for it gives a solidity of workmanship and 
produces an impression of truth which few historical 
novels possess. His genius is evident in nothing so 
much as this, that it is able to move freely under what 
a man of less imaginative power would have found a 
suffocating weight of antiquarian lore, and he rarely 
fails to fuse this mass of material into vital form. 

It has often been said that Scott fails as a writer 
through his lack of literary art. He writes well, with 
a sort of good-natured ease, and in a sound pedestrian 
fashion, but he does not write brilliantly. This is per- 
fectly true, in the sense that there are few purple 
patches in his writings. He has little gift of epigram ; 
there are few passages of his novels over which the 
mind lingers for the mere delight communicated by 
their perfection of literary form, and he scarcely ever 
utters a thought which illumines the depth of things. 
His fiction in this respect is like his poetry ; the charm 
of each is naturalness. Yet it must not be forgotten 
that Scott's prose often rises into real eloquence. Such 



60 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

a passage occurs in " The Abbot," and it is a fair sam- 
ple of a kind of philosophy common to the man who 
has never reflected very deeply upon the nature of life, 
and yet has a quick eye for much that lies upon its 
surface. After a really vivid and striking picture of 
the various personages who compose the age of which 
he writes, Scott concludes: 

In short, it was that gay and splendid confusion, in which the 
eye of youth sees all that is brave and brilliant, and that of 
experience much that is doubtful, deceitful, false, and hollow; 
hopes that will never be gratified; promises which will never be 
fulfilled; pride in the guise of humility; and insolence in that 
of frank and generous bounty. 

Many similar passages which have glow and real 
colour might be quoted, and they should be sufficient 
to prove that Scott was not so deficient in the art of 
fine writing as those who value the happy turning of 
a phrase more than the consistent picture of an epoch 
would have us imagine. 

The main fault of Scott does not lie in this direction, 
but rather in his defects as a story-teller and his lack 
of psychological interest. It is a kind of heresy to 
accuse the greatest of romancists of incapacity to tell a 
story well, and yet what reader of average intelligence 
will not corroborate the charge? Scott has not, for 
instance, the art, common to scores of inferior novel- 
ists, of fixing the attention of the reader with the first 
chapter of his novel. He is often so prolix and so dull 
that we despair of ever coming to the story, and are 
tempted to skip the first half-dozen chapters in order 
to arrive at it. The absence of plot is nearly always 
notable. It is clear that he begins to write without any 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 61 

very positive idea of the path he means to take. He 
himself has confessed so much in the Introductory 
Epistle to " The Fortunes of Nigel." 

I have repeatedly [he says] laid down my future work to 
scale, divided it into volumes and chapters, and endeavoured to 
construct a story which I meant should evolve itself gradually 
and strikingly, maintain suspense, and stimulate curiosity; and 
which, finally, should terminate in a striking catastrophe. But 
I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of 
my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the pur- 
pose. Characters expand under my hand ; incidents are multi- 
plied ; the story lingers, while my materials increase; my 
regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is 
closed long before I have attained the purpose I proposed. 

No criticism could be truer than this. With Scott 
it very often turns out that the real interest of the 
book settles round some subsidiary character, and not 
round the character which was manifestly designed for 
primacy. The love story of Waverley is forgotten 
because the mind of Scott has become fascinated with 
the romance of the Highland clans in 1745. Julia 
Mannering, who was manifestly cast for a leading part 
in the story of " Guy Mannering," is quite eclipsed by 
Meg Merrilees. The ostensible purpose of " The Heart 
of Midlothian " appears to be a vivid picture of the 
Porteous Riots. The real story of the book is the 
story of Jeannie Deans. We can scarcely grumble, 
for nothing that Scott has done is so full of real power 
and pathos ; but we may safely wager that when Scott 
began the book he had no idea of making Jeannie Deans 
its central figure. " The Heart of Midlothian " also 
illustrates another great defect of Scott as a story-teller 
— his frequent inability to end upon the true dramatic 



62 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

note. The interest of " The Heart of Midlothian " is 
exhausted when Jeannie Deans has won her sister's 
pardon ; all that follows is padding. It is true that 
some of the greatest of Scott's novels are free from 
these defects. " The Bride of Lammermoor " is an ad- 
mirably constructed story, and in " Kenilworth " the 
thread of dramatic interest is never dropped for a 
moment. That Scott did succeed as a story-teller in 
these instances suggests that his failure in many other 
instances arose rather from haste and carelessness than 
incapacity. He poured his books out so rapidly that 
he never gave himself time to meditate upon them. 
His interest in them was energetic rather than intense. 
And perhaps also he was so sure of his audience, and 
of his own power to interest his audience before he had 
done, that he thought it of little consequence to spend 
much thought upon his plot, when he was conscious of 
how splendid was the material with which he had to 
deal. 

The absence of psychological interest in Scott is a 
point more difficult of statement. It may very easily 
be put in such a form as to be a gross misstatement. 
Briefly, what is meant, is this: that while Scott can 
grasp and state with rare perspicacity the visible out- 
lines of a character, he has little gift for analysing its 
finer subtleties. His characters live — there is no mis- 
take about that ; they are as truly the creatures of 
genius as the creatures of Shakespeare, but it is in an 
entirely different way. James I. lives, but it is not as 
Hamlet lives. Jeannie Deans lives, but it is not as 
Ophelia lives. The Marguerite of Goethe's " Faust " 
lives; but what shall we say of Flora Maclvor? 
Shakespeare and Goethe have created types, Scott only 



THE WAVEHLEY NOVELS 63 

persons. Ophelia and Marguerite represent humanity ; 
Jeannie Deans represents only a very excellent speci- 
men of peasant heroism. Not only so, but the very 
personages whom Scott most clearly designs for hero 
and heroine are often, and almost uniformly, the least 
interesting personages in his books. Nigel is a terribly 
dull young man, whose adventures are only interesting 
because they serve as an introduction to the Court of 
James I., the pride and state of Buckingham, and the 
melancholy of Charles. Quentin Durward is little 
better; he is merely a note of introduction to Louis 
XL Scott's women are frequently unsuccessful, and 
perhaps the most severe test of a novelist's art is its 
power of creating women, because for such a task a 
very rare degree of psychological insight is required. 
Scott can give us the outside of his heroine, much as 
Macaulay gives us the outside of history or biography. 
He can describe her dress and manners, with a most 
vivid art, just as Macaulay describes the habits and 
appearance of Dr. Johnson. But he does not unlock 
the intimacies of personality any more than Macaulay 
does. Singularly enough he comes nearest to this 
highest form of art in his subsidiary characters. He 
does possess a real insight into the souls of abnormal, 
grotesque, or very humble persons. But in the main 
this is a gift which Scott lacks. He sees the pageant 
of life, but not its mystery ; tells us how men act, but 
not how they feel. Shakespeare did both, and hence 
the soul of Hamlet is better known to us than his 
history. If Scott had painted Hamlet, we should have 
known his history, but not his soul. 



VI 
SCOTT'S GREATNESS 

IT is characteristic of Scott's genius that his great- 
est successes are attained when he has to deal 
with the largest canvas. Give him a truly great 
scene to describe, such as the appearance of Elizabeth 
amid the revels of Kenilworth, and he is at his best. 
Nowhere, out of Shakespeare's historical dramas, can 
we find such a series of splendid figures, drawn from 
the life, and energetic with great passions and am- 
bitions. Quentin Durward may be intrinsically unim- 
pressive, and Nigel may be the most wooden of heroes, 
but how full of vital force are the figures of Louis XL 
and James I. Take such a passage as this as an 
example. It describes James I. as Nigel found him, 
when he was unexpectedly introduced to the king's 
closet : 

The scene of confusion amid which he found the king seated 
was no bad picture of the state and quality of James's own 
mind. There was much that was rich and costly in cabinet pic- 
tures and valuable ornament; but they were arranged in a 
slovenly manner, covered with dust, and lost half their value, 
or at least their effect, from the manner in which they were 
presented to the eye. The table was loaded with huge folios,, 
amongst which lay light books of jest and ribaldry; and, 
amongst notes of unmistakably long orations and essays on 
king-craft, were mingled miserable roundels and ballads of the 
" Royal Prentice," as he styled himself, in the art of poetry, 
and schemes for the general pacification of Europe, with a 
list of the names of the king's hounds, and remedies against 

64 



SCOTT'S GREATNESS 65 

canine madness. . . . Over his green doublet he wore a 
sad-coloured nightgown, out of the pocket of which peeped 
his hunting-horn. His high-crowned grey hat lay on the 
floor, covered with dust, but encircled with a carcanet of large 
balas rubies. . . . But such inconsistencies of dress and ap- 
pointment were mere outward types of those which existed in 
the royal character. He was deeply learned, without possess- 
ing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual instances, 
without having real wisdom ; . . . fond of his dignity, 
while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; 
capable of much public labour, yet often neglecting it for the 
meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, 
though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and unedu- 
cated. . . . He was laborious in trifles, and a trifler where 
serious labour was required; devout in his sentiments, and 
yet too often profane in his language; just and beneficent by 
nature, he yet gave way to the iniquities and oppressions of 
others. He was penurious respecting money which he had to 
give from his own hand, and yet inconsiderately and unbound- 
edly profuse of that which he did not see. In a word, those 
good qualities which displayed themselves in particular cases 
and occasions were not of a nature sufficiently firm and com- 
prehensive to regulate his general conduct ; and showing them- 
selves as they occasionally did, only entitled James to the 
character bestowed on him by Sully — that he was the wisest 
fool in Christendom. 

This is in itself an admirable and just description of 
James, done in the style which Macaulay afterwards 
made so popular. But it is much more than that — it is 
a collection of various clues to character in James, 
from which Scott works out a piece of truly creative 
art. The subsequent scene in Greenwich Park, when 
the king suspects Nigel of an attempt upon his person, 
and in the extremity of his cowardice imagines himself 
wounded, is a masterpiece of characterisation. The 
weakness, vanity, pedantry, awkwardness, and funda- 
mental good-nature of James reveal themselves in 



66 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

every act and word of the alarmed king. Scott him- 
self feels, and makes us feel, the curious mixture of 
affection and contempt with which he was regarded. 
When Scott is dealing with ordinary mortals he often 
writes in an ordinary way, and betrays by the lethargy 
of his style his lack of interest in them. But give him 
some great historical figure, such as a James I., a 
Louis XL, or an Elizabeth, and his genius is at once 
stimulated to a supreme effort. His art, as he truly 
says, is incapable of the fine miniature work of a Jane 
Austen ; but give him a big brush and a broad canvas, 
and he has no equal. 

It is in scenes like this that we are willing to admit 
that kinship with Shakespeare which has often been 
claimed for Scott. Carlyle's comment upon this claim, 
that " Shakespeare works from the heart outwards, 
Scott works from the skin inwards, never getting near 
the heart of men," is well known ; but it has no more 
than that measure of truth which is required to pre- 
serve a paradox from absurdity. In writing such a 
sentence it is probable that Carlyle was thinking of the 
supreme imaginative figures of Shakespeare, such as 
Hamlet and Othello, Ophelia and Desdemona; but 
such a comparison is unfair to Scott. A much fairer 
comparison would be between the historic figures of 
Shakespeare and the historic figures of Scott, because 
here the material is similar and there is coincidence of 
aim. Shakespeare himself used two entirely different 
forms of art — in the one giving form and substance to 
the bodiless creatures of his mind, in the other attempt- 
ing the vivid presentation of entirely human creatures, 
more or less known already by the part they played in 
history. The only just comparison between Shake- 



SCOTT'S GREATNESS 67 

speare and Scott must be confined to their common 
use of the latter form of art. We cannot compare 
Ophelia and Jeannie Deans ; we may compare Shake- 
speare's Wolsey with Scott's Charles Edward, 
Shakespeare's Henry VIII. with Scott's James I., and 
Shakespeare's Queen Katherine with Scott's Eliza- 
beth. And in such a comparison Scott has little to 
lose. He is doing - in another way just what Shake- 
speare does ; he is attempting the vivification of history. 
He is dealing, as Shakespeare deals, with a mass of 
more or less authenticated legends that cluster round 
a great personage. The work of each is the interpre- 
tation of a character concerning which much is al- 
ready known. It is not invention that is needed, but 
creative imagination working upon ascertained ma- 
terial. This kind of imagination Scott has in a degree 
scarcely inferior to Shakespeare. When we put the 
historical plays of Shakespeare and the historical 
romances of Scott side by side, we become conscious 
of a real kinship in their spirit, and an equal creative 
power in their representation of central figures ; and 
this is the only kind of parallel which can or should be 
permitted. 

Scott's greatest triumphs are achieved in the depic- 
tion of great historic personages and scenes, but it 
must not be forgotten that he has a firm grasp upon 
life as a whole, and a wide sympathy with all sorts 
and conditions of men. His imagination is peculiarly 
susceptible " to the influence of great achievements 
and prolonged success in wide-spreading affairs " ; 
but he was enough of a poet, and enough of a Scots- 
man, to have an almost equal sympathy with the 
simplest and humblest forms of life. Mr. Bagehot 



68 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

has pointed out, with equal truth and felicity, that 
Scott is singularly skilful in his delineation of the poor. 

He avoids the error of Dickens, who vulgarised the 
poor, making them " poor talkers, poor livers, and in 
all ways poor people to read about " ; he avoids also 
the error of sentimental novelists, who clothe the poor 
with the glamour of Arcadia. Scott's poor folk are 
genuine poor folk, shrewd, manly, sensible, generous, 
avaricious, proud, humble, selfish, and heroic. " His 
poor people are never coarse and never vulgar; their 
lineaments have the rude traits which a life of conflict 
will inevitably leave on the minds and manners of those 
who are to lead it; their notions have the narrowness 
which is inseparable from a contracted experience; 
their knowledge is not more extended than their 
restricted means of attaining it would render possible. 
Almost alone among novelists Scott has given a thor- 
ough, minute, lifelike description of poor people, which 
is at the same time genial and pleasing." 

In achieving these results Scott was no doubt greatly 
helped by the fact that he was a Scotsman, and that he 
had strong feudal sympathies. In spite of all the 
stiffness of Scotch character and Scotch respect for 
rank there has always been much more of genuine 
democratic feeling in Scotland than in England. The 
rich and poor live together in a more genuine social 
bond. The strong self-respect which exists in each 
makes intimate intercourse possible, without the sus- 
picion of condescension on the one side or of sub- 
servience on the other. Scott's lifelong friendship for 
his humble retainer, Tom Purdie, is an excellent 
example of this spirit. It was a genuine friendship, 
scarcely possible in any other country than Scotland. 



SCOTT'S GREATNESS 69 

The dying spirit of the clan, which Scott sought to 
revive, had many disadvantages ; but it had this 
supreme advantage — that it created a real community 
of life between persons of entirely different social 
position, which was destined to disappear when wealth 
became the sole claim to social honour. Scott, in 
spite of his high Tory politics, was a genuine democrat 
in spirit, and really loved the common people. Hence 
he was admitted to their intimacy, and he depicted 
them with both sympathy and knowledge. And he 
had also, as every man of real creative genius must 
have, a vivid interest in humanity at large. He has 
himself told us that he never found himself in the 
company of the stupidest of companions in a post- 
chaise without finding that, in the course of conver- 
sation, he had some ideas suggested to him which he 
would have been sorry to have been denied. It is to 
these causes that the wide popularity of Scott may be 
traced. He makes friends with all men through his 
books, as he did in his life, by virtue of his geniality, 
his shrewd good sense, his warm appreciation of all 
that is best in human nature, his comprehension of its 
hidden valours, and his sympathy with its frailties. 

The popularity which is based upon such qualities 
as these is a popularity which is likely to endure. Dur- 
ing Scott's lifetime this popularity was quite uncon- 
tested ; and he enjoyed an immunity from criticism 
which was of no advantage to him. Nor did he 
possess the gift of self-criticism. There is much truth 
in Carlyle's criticism that Scott's is " extempore writ- 
ing," and that " something very perfect of its kind 
might have come from Scott, nor was it a low kind; 
nay, who knows how high, with studious self-concen- 



70 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

tration, he might have gone ? " Carlyle was perhaps 
arguing from his own difficulty of production, or was 
thinking of the infinite patience by which Goethe built 
up his " Wilhelm Meister," when he thus criticised 
Scott. But who shall preach to genius, which is accus- 
tomed to take its own way, and is always ready to plead 
that no other way is possible to it? No doubt Scott 
might have produced far more perfect work had he pos- 
sessed more of the spirit of self-criticism and self- 
concentration. He worked too hastily to do his best, 
and writing was much more of a trade with him than a 
vocation. The real object he had in view was not the 
satisfaction of his artistic conscience in the production 
of perfect work, but the satisfaction of his romantic 
dreams in the creation of Abbotsford ; and such a 
motive is bound to be vitiating. We can plainly trace 
its effect in all his later work. We find faults of pro- 
lixity, slovenliness, and haste, which are trying to a 
temper educated in more exigent ideals of art. It 
needs a good deal of native resolution to struggle 
through the cloudiness of Scott's verbiage, the dulness 
of his preliminaries, the confusion of his plots. We 
feel sometimes that he grew tired of a book long before 
he finished it, and so do we. We find it hard to forgive 
him his habit of introducing some apparently pointless 
episode, such as the story of the Lady Hermione in 
" The Fortunes of Nigel," just at a point where his 
narrative has begun to acquire epic force and move- 
ment. We suspect him, not without reason, of a 
deliberate attempt to pad his story with matter which 
he knows is irrelevant. There is, in fact, a certain 
Scotch heaviness apparent in his books; he resembles 
the best of Scotch preachers, who are the dullest of 



SCOTT'S GREATNESS 11 

orators when they are uninspired, and the fieriest when 
they are inspired. 

But when we have said all the hard and all the just 
things we may about Scott, the fact remains that, in 
spite of Carlyle's advice, it is exceedingly doubtful if 
any amount of concentration would have enabled Scott 
to write in any other way, or any better. An extem- 
pore style of writing may be bad, yet by its means 
Scott produced so great a masterpiece as " The Bride 
of Lammermoor " in six weeks. It may be wrong to 
write for money, yet it is pretty certain that Shake- 
speare had the main chance well in view, even when 
he wrote " Hamlet," and he followed it so well that he 
died a prosperous burgher of Stratford-on-Avon. We 
have fallen in love to-day with the introspective novel ; 
but Scott had never heard of it, and could not have 
produced it if he had. We like novels that explain 
philosophy or attack religion ; Scott was content to tell 
a story, and let philosophy and religion look after 
themselves. He was simply a large-hearted and 
humane man of the world; an out-of-doors man who 
cared for his horses and his dogs a good deal more than 
he cared for the praise of his critics ; a lover of life 
and of his kind, who took life generously and heartily ; 
a man of instinctive virtue, of genial sanity, of great 
depth and sweetness of disposition, of quiet but authen- 
tic heroism in the hour of trial ; one of the truly great 
men of the world, because he was in so much a child, 
and kept the child-like heart- of love and simplicity, of 
natural piety and joy, to the last. He wrote according 
to his nature, and being by nature great, in spite of all 
his faults, he has written in a great way, and has left 
behind him a beloved and imperishable memory. 




VII 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE 
THACKERAY 

Born July 18th, 1811, in Calcutta. Published " The Paris 
Sketchbook," 1840; " The Yellowplush Papers," 1841; began 
publication of "Vanity Fair" in monthly numbers, 1847; 
" Pcndcnnis," 1848; "Esmond," 1852; "The Newcomes," 
1853; Editor of " The Cornhill Magazine" i860. Died on 
Christmas Eve, 1863, at Palace Green, Kensington. 

'ALTER SCOTT died, worn out with heroic 
labours, in the autumn of 1832. He retained 
to the last his great popularity, in spite of 
the manifest failure of his later novels. It was only 
to be expected that he should have had many imitators, 
the chief of whom was Mr. G. P. R. James, whose 
first successful novel, " Richelieu," was published in 
1825, and the best of whom, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, 
attained a reputation which was undiminished almost 
half a century after Scott's death. John Gait, the au- 
thor of " The Ayrshire Legatees " and " The Annals 
of Our Parish," must also be ranked with the disciples 
of Scott as a painter of Scottish life. Gait has only 
been equalled by Scott himself in the combined skill 
and humour with which he has described the foibles of 
the humble Scottish folk, and his fame would have 
stood much higher had his career been less unfortunate 
and his life less brief. The immediate influence of 

72 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 73 

Scott upon his contemporaries is visible in the works 
of these writers, but nevertheless for some time before 
Scott's death there were signs of changing taste in 
the public. The fame of Bulwer Lytton was achieved 
with the publication of " Falkland," in 1827, five years 
before Scott's death. In 1836, four years after Scott's 
death, appeared " Sketches by Boz," by Charles Dick- 
ens. In the same year in which Scott died Thackeray 
came of age, and in 1837 may be said to have begun 
the career of definite authorship by the publication of 
" The History of Samuel Titmarsh," in " Frazer's 
Magazine." 

Fame has, upon the whole, been kindest to the last 
of these three writers. Thackeray has taken his un- 
questioned place as a classic, supported by the unani- 
mous voice of criticism, and the somewhat reluctant, 
but nevertheless growing appreciation of the public. 
In the case of Dickens a distinction may be drawn 
between fame and popularity. The popular and the 
critical voices must be combined to produce fame. So 
far as the popular voice is concerned, no writer, not 
even Scott himself, has ever secured such an over- 
whelming plebiscite of praise ; but hitherto, for various 
reasons, which may be considered later, criticism has 
been much divided on his merits. With Bulwer Lytton 
a worse thing has happened. After being hailed as a 
man of supreme genius by the critics of his own gen- 
eration, he has been treated as an impostor by the 
critics of our own, and his novels, which once achieved 
boundless popularity, are now practically forgotten. 
The careers of these writers so closely coincide, that 
their greatest books were challenging attention at one 
time, which may be roughly defined as extending from 



74 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the death of Scott, in 1832, to the death of Dickens, 
in 1870. 

In contrast with Scott several things are at once 
apparent about Thackeray. The first is that he was 
a man of the world in a sense in which Scott was not. 
Scott was racy of his own soil, and remained so to the 
last. Thackeray was, by the very nature of his life as 
well as by temper, cosmopolitan. He had been edu- 
cated in the proud traditions of an English gentleman ; 
had early been brought into contact with the wider 
life of his race ; was an artist and a club-man, touching 
on one side the life of Bohemia, and on the other the 
life of Mayfair; was travelled, cultured, and widely 
read, and was in all things the child of cities. Being 
thus a man of the world, it was inevitable that the 
material of his novels should be different from Scott's. 
Again, it must be noted that Thackeray brought fiction 
back to modern reality, from the study of the past 
to the study of the present. Not that Thackeray had 
not a very real kinship with Scott in his love of the 
past. He knew certain periods of history with a 
critical accuracy which Scott never attained. His 
" Esmond " is among the greatest, if not the greatest, 
of all historical novels in the English language. But 
even " Esmond " is penetrated by the modern spirit. 
Thackeray may write brilliantly of the past, but it is 
always with the pen of the man who lives in the 
present. He is also the founder of what may be called 
philosophic fiction. Scott, and indeed all his prede- 
cessors, had been content simply to tell a tale or to de- 
pict the movement of events in their relation to char- 
acter. Here and there passages of reflection occur, 
but they express little more than the trite common- 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 



lb 



places of morality. Thackeray, on the contrary, has 
a definite philosophy to expound. He holds a certain 
view of life, which he regards as essential, and whether 
he is writing- of the times of Marlborough or Welling- 
ton his art is constantly dominated by his philosophy, 
and the message he has to declare is distinctive. In 
all these respects Thackeray differs entirely from Scott. 
He introduces a new spirit into English fiction, and im- 
pels its development upon new lines. Scott really 
brings to a climax and splendid close the older school 
of fiction, although he has little in common with it; 
Thackeray — and with him Dickens must be reckoned 
a co-partner — inaugurates the new school. 

There is another point to be noticed, which is even 
more significant. Thackeray's fiction is the intimate 
product of his temperament. This is not quite the 
same thing as saying that it expresses his philosophy 
of life ; what is meant is rather that Thackeray's fic- 
tion has a personal element, in which the expression 
of his own character counts for more than the expres- 
sion of his philosophy. It would be difficult to form an 
idea of the personal character of Fielding or Smollett 
from their books ; and we have already remarked that 
Jane Austen gives us no hint of her own thoughts and 
opinions in all her voluminous writings. The same 
thing is equally true of Scott. No one, after reading 
the Waverley Novels from beginning to end, could 
form any correct idea of what manner of man their 
author was. He stands detached from his writings, 
himself unknown and unwilling to be known. Thus, 
for example, no one would suspect, in reading the later 
novels of Scott, that he was a less happy or fortunate 
man than when he wrote the earlier novels. An im- 



76 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

mense misfortune has beaten him to the ground, but 
there is no hint of it in his writings. He goes on 
writing in the same way, with some diminution of 
energy and spirit no doubt, but with no change of 
temper. The man in all things stands distinct from 
his writings, and the last thing of which Scott would 
have dreamed would have been to make his novels the 
channel of personal confession. 

Thackeray's novels, on the contrary, are one pro- 
longed personal confession. He creates characters, 
invents situations, narrates events, but behind all there 
is the subtle and pervasive element of his own person- 
ality. We are interested in Becky Sharp and Beatrix 
Esmond ; we are equally interested in Thackeray. We 
follow their adventures with delight, but we wait with 
equal delight for Thackeray's comments upon them. 
We look into their hearts, but all the time we know 
that we are engaged in looking into the heart of 
Thackeray. This is a new element in fiction, closely 
akin to the new element which is vaguely described 
as the " personal note " introduced into the poetry of 
Byron. Although poetry is in the nature of things the 
most personal form of literature, yet there is a marked 
difference between the poetry of the early eighteenth 
century and the poetry of the nineteenth century, in 
the slightness of the personal note in the one, and the 
fulness of that note in the other. Pope and Gray tell 
us little of themselves ; Byron and Shelly tell us every- 
thing. The poetry of Pope may be judged as literature 
alone; but one cannot judge the poetry of Byron and 
Shelly in this way, because the personal pathos and 
tragedy of the careers of the two poets are continually 
insistent on our memory. This new sensitiveness, this 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 77 

impulse of self-revelation which Byron introduced into 
poetry, Thackeray introduces into fiction ; and we see 
this tendency in much of later nineteenth-century 
prose, such as Hazlitt's ; still more in its greatest poetry, 
such as Browning's, and in almost all its greatest fic- 
tion, which has been produced under an impulse of self- 
confession, and is a veritable literature of temperament. 
It becomes, therefore, a matter of importance to 
know what manner of man Thackeray was, since the 
right understanding of his work is impossible without 
the right understanding of the man. The masculine 
quality of his intellect needs no exposition. Lord 
Houghton, in the noble memorial verses which he wrote 
on Thackeray's death, rightly singles out this quality 
for praise, when he compares him with Dryden and 
Fielding : " Fielding without the manner's dross." 
Lord Houghton does not perceive so clearly that there 
was in Thackeray an exquisite sensitiveness, quite 
wanting in Dryden and Fielding. In all that concerns 
style Thackeray is masculine enough, but in the greater 
matter of the spirit he displays a sensitiveness almost 
morbid in its capability of pain. There is a very 
touching passage in " Vanity Fair " in which Thack- 
eray speaks of the lonely and bitter childhood of Will- 
iam Dobbin, and goes on to ask, " Who amongst us is 
there who does not recollect similar hours of bitter, 
bitter, childish grief? Who feels injustice ; who shrinks 
before a slight ; who has a sense of wrong so acute, and 
so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous 
boy ? " One cannot but suspect an element of auto- 
biography in this passage. There is much in Thack- 
eray's writings which gives us the impression that his 
heart was badly bruised in childhood. No man had a 



78 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

friendlier nature, none a finer capacity for making 
friends, and yet there was a certain loneliness in 
Thackeray's life. Perhaps it was in the main that 
loneliness of individuality of which he himself has 
spoken, when he says that " the giants live apart " : 
but it was also the loneliness peculiar to highly sensitive 
natures, which have a distrust of life, based upon an 
insistent sense of the unsatisfactoriness and the fre- 
quent cruelty of life. It is not that Thackeray does 
not enjoy life at times, and does not often write as a 
man who enjoys it. It is not that he is destitute of 
courage to live life boldly ; he is a writer who has a 
really fortifying message to those who shrink from the 
battle of life. But he cannot help writing as a man who 
has survived all youthful illusions about life. He is 
none the worse for the process, because he has kept his 
courage, and the heart of a little child, and his faith 
in " the ultimate decency of things." But henceforth, 
even in the gayest scenes, he is uneasily conscious of 
painful things which are visible to no one else. 
Through his most boisterous burlesque — and no man 
ever wrote burlesque so well — there throbs the ground 
note of sadness. From first to last the sermon he 
preaches is from the text of his greatest book, " Vanitas 
Vanitatem omnia Vanitas." 

Many instances of this extreme sensitiveness of 
Thackeray to the tragic elements of human life will 
suggest themselves. It very often comes upon the 
reader as a surprise, because there is nothing in the 
immediate context of the story to suggest it. We ex- 
pect the note of tragedy in " Macbeth " ; but Thackeray 
makes us aware of it in the servants' hall. It is to 
the tragedy of common things that Thackeray is most 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 79 

sensitive, hearing - always behind the decent shows of 
life " the still sad music of humanity." Take, for 
example, this passage : 

Between me and those fellow-creatures of mine who are 
sitting in the room below, how strange and wonderful is the 
partition ! We meet at every hour of daylight, and are indebted 
to each other for a hundred offices of duty and comfort of 
life ; and we live together for years and don't know each other. 
John's voice to me is quite different to John's voice when he 
addresses his mates below. If I met Hannah in the street 
with her bonnet on, I doubt whether I should know her. And 
all these good people, with whom I may live for years and 
years, have cares, interests, dear friends and relatives, mayhap 
schemes, passions, longing hopes, tragedies of their own, from 
which a carpet and a few planks and beams utterly separate 
me, When we were at the seaside, and poor Ellen used to 
look so pale, and run after the postman's bell, and seize a 
letter in a great scrawling hand, and read it, and cry in a cor- 
ner, how should we know that the poor little thing's heart 
was breaking? She fetched the water, and she smoothed the 
ribbons, and she laid out the dresses, and brought the early 
cup of tea in the morning, just as if she had no cares to keep 
her awake. 

And then he goes on to tell the story of his man- 
servant Henry, who waited at table through a tedious 
dinner, and at last, when every guest was attended to, 
said meekly, " If you please, sir, may I go home ? " 

He had received word that his house was on fire; and, 
having seen through his dinner, he wished to go and look after 
his children and little sticks of furniture. 

That is all. It is not Thackeray's manner to enter 
upon any pathetic dilation of the scene — he lets it 
work its own inevitable effect. But who does not see 



80 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

at once that to a man with this supersensitiveness of 
nature life could not but be painful ? The pain he suf- 
fered is what Mrs. Humphry Ward has called " the 
horrible pain of sympathy " ; and, we may add, the 
noble pain too. 

The sensitiveness of Thackeray is responsible for the 
spirit of irony which pervades his writings. He is full 
of sentiment, but ashamed of sentiment ; he wishes to 
confess himself fully, but he shrinks from possible 
ridicule ; he constantly gives us the impression of a 
man who is afraid to let himself go. Hence he falls 
back upon irony, which is the defence of the shy and 
sensitive man. His heart is full of soft feeling, of 
magnanimity, tenderness, nobleness, but he knows how 
these qualities are regarded by the rough world, and 
he has reason to dread the world's criticism. What 
can he do in self-defence but adopt the tone of the 
world? How can he better guard himself from the 
impertinence of the world's scrutiny than by making 
believe that he also is a true child of Vanity Fair? 
And he makes believe too successfully for his credit. 
He will talk as though all men were liars, as though 
tenderness were an unknown quality in human relations 
and magnanimity an extinct virtue, as though greed 
and grab and Mammon and the service of the golden 
calf were the chief forces at work in society. He 
overdoes his part purposely, trusting to the wise dis- 
cernment of his reader to recognise the imposition and 
the reason for it. He reserves for such discerning 
readers his whispered asides, in which the real man 
speaks. They will see " the fire of unshed tears " in 
his eyes while he jests ; they will hear the thrilling note 
of pain through his brilliant banter. There is in his 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 81 

heart a little black pool of pain which is apt to over- 
flow, and poison all the channels of his life — they will 
perceive it. He is conscious of a certain hysteric tend- 
ency to weep against his will, because the awful 
tragedy of life at times overcomes him — they will un- 
derstand it. No doubt the discerning reader does 
understand, but all readers are not discerning. The 
stupid people are very numerous, and nothing is so in- 
comprehensible to a stupid man as irony. Hence it 
happens that Thackeray's irony is constantly misunder- 
stood. He is thought to be in earnest when he jests, 
and jesting when he is in earnest. For the last thing a 
man who is neither shy nor sensitive is capable of un- 
derstanding is that the shy man is shy about his most 
sacred beliefs, often belying them in his words ; and 
that the sensitive man goes in fear of his sensitive- 
ness, often making haste to laugh for fear that he 
should weep. 

The result of this common misunderstanding of 
Thackeray's ironical method is that he has been ac- 
cused of cynicism. The accusation has obtained too 
much credence to be brusquely ignored. What is a 
cynic? One of our dramatists has replied with the 
brilliant definition that " a cynic is a man who knows 
the price of everything and the value of nothing." In 
this sense Thackeray was certainly no cynic. No man 
knew better the value of the best things in life, such as 
virtue, honour, love, courage, and magnanimity. If he 
also knew that there are other qualities in human na- 
ture which often have their price in Vanity Fair, he 
only knew what every moralist and every man of the 
world knows but too well. Swift was an unquestion- 
able cynic, because he had no belief in the radical 



82 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

goodness of human nature. He saw no good thing in 
man, and quite honestly believed him to be the vilest 
and most detestable of all animals. Will any one ven- 
ture to say that Thackeray manifests anything like 
the same hatred and repugnance toward human nature 
which Swift displays? Thackeray's own essay on Swift 
is a significant answer. " What had this man done ? " 
he writes, " what secret remorse was rankling at his 
heart? What fever was boiling in him, that he 
should see all the world bloodshot? A weary heart 
gets no gladness out of sunshine : a selfish man is 
sceptical about friendship, a man with no ear doesn't 
care for music." In an earlier passage of the same 
essay Thackeray denounces Swift for that very cyni- 
cism which refused all reverence for human nature. He 
accuses him of being himself nothing better than a 
Yahoo : " a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing 
imprecations against mankind — tearing down all 
shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and 
shame ; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, 
obscene." It was no cynic who could write thus of 
the supreme cynic of English literature. Thackeray 
has no particle of sympathy with the main thesis of all 
cynicism, which is the utter pettiness, meanness, and 
imbecility of mankind. Yet there must be some ground 
for the charge of cynicism made against him. It is 
not an accusation made by stupid people only ; Mr. 
Frederic Harrison has made it. The stupid man may 
be bewildered by irony, and misinterpret it; we can 
hardly suppose a really brilliant critic like Mr. Harri- 
son so dull as to mistake Thackeray's exposition of a 
base man's view of life for his own view. How is it 
then that the charge has come to be made, and to be so 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 83 

generally believed? I think the answer is found in 
the kind of material which Thackeray employed in the 
creation of his fictions. He constituted himself the 
censor of his age. He had, of necessity, to bring him- 
self into contact with much that was most corrupt 
in that age. He has exposed that corruption so thor- 
oughly that the impression has been created that he 
took pleasure in his task, and did it with a gusto. His 
work of censor has been forgotten; what has been 
recollected is the obvious fact that the world he paints 
abounds in men and women who display the meanest 
qualities, and are actuated by the meanest passions of 
human nature. 



VIII 

CHARACTERISTICS OF 
THACKERAY 



F""] [~~1HE great characteristic of Thackeray is, then, his 
assumption of his part of the satirist and cen- 
•"*" sor of morals. That he does go about his work 
as censor with gusto no one will deny. He is conscious 
that he wields the keenest of weapons, and he has the 
same kind of pleasure in its use that a great surgeon 
has in the delicate and finely tempered instruments of 
his art. He lays bare the secrecies of the soul with a 
subtle skill which cannot but afford artistic pleasure to 
himself ; and the more intricate the operation, the more 
secret the disease, the more deftly concealed the sor- 
didness or essential meanness of the soul submitted to 
his moral surgery, the keener is his pleasure in the 
triumph of his art. All this is natural ; perhaps it is 
natural, too, that he should appear to us more at home 
in dissecting the foibles, follies, and meannesses of hu- 
man nature than in discovering its magnanimities. 
There can be no doubt that upon the whole his bad 
people are better done than his good folk; they are 
more vital and complete, and therefore more impres- 
sive. Colonel Newcome is one of the noblest charac- 
ters in fiction ; but noble as he is, his nobility too often 
verges on a simplicity which lessens our respect for 
him. Amelia, with all her virtues, is silly, and Dobbin 
is a good deal of a fool. But where are there any 

84 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 85 

characters in fiction drawn with such superb art as 
Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond? Becky Sharp is 
the supreme creation of modern fiction. We see her 
under variety of circumstance, and in all she is abso- 
lutely consistent and artistically impressive. Her cun- 
ning, daring, greed, her fundamental good-nature, her 
contempt of principle, her wonderful skill in acting 
any part that serves her ends, her quickness and sub- 
tlety of mind — all are rendered with a sort of dreadful 
truth. It is as though her creator flung a search-light 
into the innermost recesses of her nature, and showed 
us the crawling vileness of the woman. We follow 
her, repelled and yet fascinated, from first to last. Of 
course this is a great triumph for the literary artist. 
And, in extenuation, we ought to remember two 
things : first, that the character of Becky Sharp is ab- 
solutely consistent with the scheme of the book ; and, 
secondly, .that all great artists have found it easier to 
make an impression with a bad character than with a 
good one. The last observation is self-evident. There 
is no student of Shakespeare who will not admit that 
Iago is a more powerfully sketched character than 
Othello, and that Lady Macbeth is much more impres- 
sive than Desdemona. There are few novels in which 
the villain and the sinner do not hold the stage ; even 
George Eliot, with all her will to put ethics before art, 
cannot help making Hetty Sorrel more fascinating 
than Dinah Morris, and Tito Melema more interesting 
than Romola. It is almost of the nature of things that 
it should be so. We know all about goodness, but we 
know little of the subtleties of sin, and they excite our 
utmost curiosity. Such a theme calls out all the 
psychological power of the true artist. It affords him 



86 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the raw material of tragedy. And thus, in spite of him- 
self, it often happens that, as an author develops his 
book, such a character as Becky Sharp's fascinates his 
own mind, gradually usurps the stage, and from a 
moral point of view throws the whole picture out of 
perspective. 

We must also remember the scheme and plan of 
such a book as " Vanity Fair." The very title of the 
book is its own apologia. It does not pretend to pre- 
sent us with an adequate picture of life as a whole, 
but of one section of it only. It is, as Mr. Frederic 
Harrison has justly called it, " a long comedy of 
roguery, meanness, selfishness, and affectation. Rakes, 
ruffians, bullies, fortune-hunters, adventurers, women 
who sell themselves, and men who cheat and cringe, 
pass before us in one incessant procession, crushing 
the weak and making fools of the good. Such, says 
our author, is the way of Vanity Fair — which we are 
warned to loathe and shun." We may admit that it is 
not pleasant ; but is it true ? Was Thackeray, writing 
when he did, and living in the world that then existed, 
justified in so scathing a piece of satire? It is quite 
beside the mark to say that we do not like satire. It 
is equally beside the mark to say that we have never 
known such a world as this. The thing to be remem- 
bered is that in all ages the satirist of manners has been 
of the utmost service to society in exposing its follies 
and lashing its vices. It is the work of the great satirist 
to apply the caustic to the ulcers of society ; and if we 
are to let our dislike of satire overrule our judgment, 
we shall not only record our votes against a Juvenal 
and a Swift, but equally against the whole line of J 
Hebrew prophets. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 87 

Again, it is a recognised rule of literature that we 
must make allowance for books according to the age in 
which they were written. We make this allowance in 
the case of Shakespeare and Fielding; the life they 
knew was often brutal, manners were coarse, and 
speech outspoken, and we admit that books written at 
such a time could not but reflect the nature of their 
age. Thackeray claims, and has a right to claim, the 
same literary charity. He professed to know by heart 
a certain corner of the world, and he described it as it 
was. It is no concern of ours whether we like the 
description or not ; what we should ask is, Is it cor- 
rect, is Becky Sharp a true picture of the scheming 
and unprincipled woman of keen brain and loose mor- 
als, and is this indeed Vanity Fair? 

To that question any dispassionate critic is bound to 
reply in the affirmative. The vital force with which 
Becky Sharp seizes on the mind is a proof of the truth 
of the conception, and the same remark applies to the 
whole book. It is an almost absolute rule that no 
book makes a great impression on the general mind 
that is not substantially true to life. Failing in that, it 
fails in everything. It is passed on to the limbo of the 
artificial and fantastic, and is quickly forgotten. 

But the larger question is, Does such a book enlist 
our sympathies on the side of vice or virtue? The 
whole debate on the claims of realism of which we hear 
so much to-day ought to turn — though often it is very 
far from doing so — on the answer to this question. We 
have a right, and a just right, to expect morality in 
the creations of art. There is much nonsense talked 
on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of novelists writing 
with a purpose. But all great artists are bound to 



88 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

have a purpose in their writing. Could Hamlet, could 
Macbeth, could Othello, have come into existence with- 
out some deliberate purpose in the mind of Shake- 
speare, some intention to use a dramatic motive for 
moral ends? Each play of Shakespeare's has its pur- 
pose deliberately written on it. It is written in accord 
with supreme moral instincts, and is thus what a play 
was often called in the dawn of dramatic art — " a 
morality." It is the same with novels, which in our 
age have taken the place held by the drama in Eliza- 
beth's day. They are not, and cannot be, mere irre- 
sponsible and unrelated transcripts of life. To put it 
at the very lowest, they are written from some point 
of view ; they express the writer's sense of what human 
life is like ; and thus they unconsciously express also 
his moral ideas — or the absence of them. The chief 
matter about a novel, then, is not so much what it is 
composed of; what elements of life and what tran- 
scripts of human character are included in it; whether 
it deals with high life or low life, picturing for the 
most part men of character and virtue, or, on the other 
hand, rogues and profligates, — the chief question is, 
Does it finally and irresistibly enlist our sympathies 
on the side of goodness or evil, of virtue or vice ? 

In Thackeray's case the answer to this question is 
quite beyond cavil. Not only has he no sympathy 
with vice, but he is quite pitiless toward it. He has 
much less charity even than George Eliot, who has a 
way of hinting that the vices of her characters are 
hereditary, and therefore indelible, and may be fairly 
regarded with pity. Thackeray, on the contrary, is 
not merely merciless in his analysis of evil, but he 
constantly steps aside from the platform of pure art to 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 89 

occupy the pulpit of the hortatory moralist. In all his 
books the moralist shares the honours with the artist, 
and that man must be possessed of a very curious 
temperament who can read Thackeray without a sense 
of moral invigoration. No doubt Thackeray does 
show us a terrible " comedy of roguery, meanness, and 
selfishness " ; quite as certainly he makes us loathe and 
shun the vices which he dissects with such pitiless 
elaboration. 

But Thackeray does much more than scourge vice ; 
throughout his books there runs a genuine vein of 
religion. A perfectly just claim might be made for him 
that he is the most religious of all English novelists, 
because he touches more constantly, more subtly and 
profoundly, than any other novelist those chords of 
sweet and reverent feeling which compose the religious 
sentiment. 

Thackeray's religion is conventional in type, but it 
is entirely free from the insincerities of conventional- 
ism. His ideal of religion is the ideal of the average 
Englishman of culture — a religion grave, sober, reti- 
cent, careful of decorum, averse to enthusiasm, respect- 
ful of usage, and in the main built upon solid virtues 
rather than speculative dogmas. It is true that he 
not infrequently introduces some type of religiosity 
that he may ridicule it. Sir Pitt Crawley, with his 
narrow puritanism, is an instance ; so is Lady Emily 
Sheepshanks, of whose famous tract, " The Washer- 
woman of Finchley Common," we hear somewhat too 
much. The unforgettable descriptions of the pomp- 
ous obsequies over old Sir Pitt, and of Becky Sharp 
after her downfall, going to church with great regu- 
larity, and becoming known as the patron of good 



90 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

works, are touched with a much bitterer and more 
deserved irony. But it is not in such passages that 
we should look for the expression of Thackeray's re- 
ligion ; that religion finds its real expression in the ten- 
derness and the devoutness with which he speaks of 
the mysteries and discipline of life. How exquisite, 
for example, is the picture he draws of the widowed 
Amelia and her child: 

Every night and every morning he and she — (in that awful 
and touching communion, which I think must bring a thrill to 
the heart of every man who witnessed or remembers it) — the 
mother and her little boy — prayed to Our Father together, the 
mother pleading with all her gentle heart, the child lisping after 
her as she spoke. And each time they prayed to God to bless 
dear papa, as if he were alive, and in the room with them. 

Amelia Sedley is, as Thackeray frankly tells us, a 
weak creature, but he reveres her for her pious and 
humble heart. Old Sedley is also weak, but he meets 
death with quiet fortitude, and Thackeray supplies the 
true comment on his misfortunes when he says, " Well, 
well, — a carriage and three thousand a year is not the 
summit of the reward nor the end of God's judgment 
of men." The same reading of life appears in Colonel 
Newcome, who grows in all the graces of the heart 
under the discipline of sorrow, and keeps through all 
his misfortunes the simple faith of a little child. 

Thackeray appears to paint these weak and unfortu- 
nate people for the express purpose of showing us how 
true a stay a humble faith in God is amid the vicissi- 
tudes of life. He says many bitter things of the fortu- 
nate, but there is only kindness in his lips when he 
speaks of the unfortunate. Towards the end of his 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 91 

own life he writes that as he walked through the 
streets of Edinburgh his heart was " strangely soft- 
ened." The heart of Thackeray often knew that gra- 
cious mood ; and when these devout gusts of tender- 
ness pass over him, and memory, sympathy, and faith 
unseal the fountains of his emotion, no English novel- 
ist writes with so manly a pathos and piety, and none 
moves us so deeply. Perhaps it was of this very walk 
that Dr. John Brown has given us so vivid a descrip- 
tion. Dr. Brown tells us that, at the north-west end 
of Corstmorphine Hill, there rose black against the 
pure radiance of the evening sky a wooden crane, and 
that, as they gazed at it, Thackeray gave utterance in 
a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice to what all were 
feeling, in the word " Calvary." " All that evening 
he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom 
did, of divine things, of death, of sin, of eternity, of 
salvation ; expressing his simple faith in God, and in 
his Saviour." The story is entirely characteristic. Be- 
hind all the assumed levity of Thackeray, and at the 
root of all his irony, there was a profound religious 
nature, and there is no book of his that does not con- 
tain many wise and beautiful passages which are the 
true expression of a pious heart. 

It is from this rare union in Thackeray of a mascu- 
line intellect with a deeply pious and tender heart that 
his gift of pathos is derived. The power of pathos, so 
often associated with a certain weak sentimentalism, 
a certain femininity of temperament, is associated in 
Thackeray with the strongest masculine qualities, and 
is all the more impressive because it is governed by 
the natural reticence of the masculine temperament. 
We can imagine what the feminine novelist, who is as 



92 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

often a man as a woman, would have made of the 
death of George Osborn at Waterloo — the pages of 
rhetoric, the notes of exclamation, and the effusion 
of sentiment: Thackeray contents himself with two 
sentences : 

No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled 
miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and 
Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, 
dead, with a bullet through his heart. 

There is no striving after effect, no laborious accumu- 
lation of detail ; the pathos of Thackeray is quite ef- 
fortless, but as potent as Nature herself. It comes 
nearer the supreme art of Shakespeare than any other 
writer has done ; it is like Shakespeare's pathos — the 
pathos of the packed phrase, the pathos of the brief 
poignant word, which goes to the root of things. 

The pathos of Thackeray is certainly quite different 
in quality from the pathos of any other novelist, and is 
at the very pole of what passes for pathos in his great 
rival, Dickens. Is there any man of mature years who 
finds himself still affected to tears by the death of Little 
Nell? Is there any reader of average critical instinct 
who does not perceive the artificiality of the entire 
death-scene of Paul Dombey? One need not go so 
far as to say that these scenes strike the note of mock 
pathos — they do not ; they are truly pathetic after their 
fashion, but it is an artificial, a melodramatic fashion. 
Compare with them the death of Colonel Newcome ; or 
the less hackneyed account of the death of Samuel 
Titmarsh's first child : 

We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning, but on 
Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 93 

all Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it; but it 
pleased God to take the innocent infant from us, and on Sun- 
day, at midnight, it lay a corpse on its mother's bosom. 
Amen! We have other children happy and well, now round 
about us, and from the father's heart the memory of 
this little thing has almost faded; but I do believe that every 
day of her life the mother thinks of her first-born that was 
with her for so short a while ; . . . and she wears still at 
her neck a little, little lock of golden hair, which she took 
from the head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin. It 
has happened to me to forget the child's birthday, but to her 
never ! 

No elaboration, no attempt to wring- the heart ; the 
whole description is so plain as to be almost bald; yet 
who does not feel its overwhelming - tenderness, and 
who of us, laboriously trying from time to time to 
describe some crisis of human sorrow, does not envy 
this power of achieving so fine a result by such simple 
means ? 

The same element of ease and unaffected natural- 
ness which distinguishes the pathos of Thackeray is 
apparent in his humour and in his entire art. He is 
never guilty of forcing the note. He never mistakes 
farce for humour. He can see the oddities of human 
character, but in rendering them he avoids the tempta- 
tion to the grotesque. There is a certain balance of 
mind in Thackeray, an old-fashioned dignity of char- 
acter, very rare in imaginative writers. He prefers to 
move among ordinary people, describing them with 
easy wit ; they are quite sufficient to stimulate his im- 
agination. There is not a single person in " Vanity 
Fair " who is not a perfectly normal type, and the ma- 
jority are commonplace. Sedley and old Osborn are 
ordinary men of commerce. The distinguishing note 



94 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of Dobbin and Amelia is that they are undistinguished. 
The Crawleys are a dull race, and Rawdon Crawley is 
the dullest of them all. Even Lord Steyne and Re- 
becca Sharp are quite recognisable types. If we turn, 
by way of contrast, to the pages of Dickens or Victor 
Hugo or Balzac, we find that very often the reverse 
is true. The temptation to the grotesque is potent with 
each. The modesty of nature is constantly exceeded 
in order to produce striking effects. Pecksniff is not 
a man — he is a vice. Creatures like Jean Valjean of 
Hugo or the Vautrin of Balzac are personifications of 
a theory ; they are something more, and something less 
than human. They are the creatures of genius, no 
doubt; but it is a kind of genius that lacks lucidity, 
balance, justness, and reasoned apprehension. But in 
Thackeray's genius the most remarkable quality is this 
very justness of apprehension. It is the product, in 
part at least, of strong intelligence and wide culture. 
He possessed the critical spirit in a degree that is rare 
among novelists. He had more than genuine historical 
knowledge of certain periods — he had the historical 
instinct. His " Lectures on the Four Georges " and 
the " English Humorists " are a proof of both. His 
masterly description of Marlborough in " Esmond " 
is unequalled by any similar description in the pages of 
professed historians. His own novels are, in fact, his- 
tories. They are colloquial histories, done with a rapid 
pen and a full mind. They are the outpouring of a 
man of trained intelligence and wide knowledge, who 
is so sure of the inherent interest of his material that 
he is relatively careless about the art of construction 
and situation. Thus, while they are really the creations 
of a very fine and delicate art, they appear artless; 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 95 

while they abound in fine situations, they depend for 
interest less upon situation than any other novels in 
the language ; and while they are supreme works of 
imagination, we are less conscious of their imaginative 
genius than of their critical penetration, their reasoned 
wisdom, their rare intelligence. 

This predominance of the critical spirit in Thack- 
eray, this constant sway of intelligence over imagina- 
tion, produced a curious temper of detachment between 
the man and his work. He uses the right word for his 
creatures when he speaks of them as " puppets " : 
" Come, children, let us shut up the box and the 
puppets, for our play is played out." We read of 
Dickens becoming so interested in his creatures that 
he wept and laughed over them ; and Stevenson com- 
plains that his heroes have a disastrous knack of turn- 
ing their backs on him, and walking bodily off the 
stage, to his unutterable dismay. It is safe to say that 
Thackeray experienced none of these sensations. He 
makes no complaint, as many novelists have done, that 
his creatures " will not come right," and to some ex- 
tent his art suffered by this lack of self-absorption in 
it. He is apt to write about his characters instead of 
letting them reveal themselves. Welcome as his fre- 
quent disquisition is for its wit and irony and tender- 
ness, yet it is sometimes a hindrance to his narrative. 
What can we say, but that it is Thackeray's method — a 
peculiar and unique method, which he alone can jus- 
tify? Puppets his creatures are, yet so firmly handled, 
so convincingly contrived, that it is only when their 
author bids us step behind the curtain that we perceive 
the string that moves them. For the most part the 
illusion is complete. Nothing can be liker life than 



96 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the great scenes in which George Osborn takes farewell 
of his wife before Waterloo, or the yet greater scene in 
which Becky's intrigue with Lord Steyne is detected 
by her husband. It is the most vital praise that can 
be given to Thackeray, that in spite of a method which 
is radically bad he makes it the instrument of superb 
triumph. He becomes the artist while remaining the 
moralist. He excites our strongest interest in his 
drama, while he himself regards it with a kind of 
distant commiseration. He leaves us thrilling to his 
play, in spite of his ironical pains to assure us that 
the heroine is painted, and the hero but a sorry 
creature off the stage. In a lesser writer such liberties 
would be resented ; if we do not complain of them in 
Thackeray, but rather enjoy them, it is because the 
genius of the writer is so great that we become un- 
conscious of the eccentricities of its expression. 

A word may be added on Thackeray's place as a 
writer. Thackeray is one of the greatest masters of 
style in English literature. The greatness of his style 
lies in its simplicity, its ease, its unaffected eloquence, 
its nervous strength. He wrote rapidly, but never 
carelessly. Through all the twenty-six volumes of his 
writings there is not a page which is not technically 
perfect. He had an instinct for the subtleties of lan- 
guage, trained by long acquaintance with Queen Anne 
literature. His writing has that quality which is rarest 
in good writing — it is good writing, but not fine 
writing. He has no need and no wish to contort lan- 
guage in order to achieve brilliance ; he avoids the 
" purple patch " ; but his style never fails to flow with 
an equal melody, which delights the ear without as- 
tonishing it. The last thing to be said of Thackeray, 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THACKERAY 97 

then, is not the least thing — it is that he is a great 
writer as well as a great novelist, which is a rare 
achievement. Others have known how to tell a story 
as well as he, and indeed many lesser men have been 
better story-tellers ; but no English novelist has em- 
ployed in the telling of his tale a style of such dignity, 
such purity and strength and real distinction. 



IX 

CHARLES DICKENS 

Born at Landport, Portsmouth, February 7th, 1812. First 
original paper, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," published in " The 
Monthly Magazine," December, 1833; " Sketches by Bos," 1836; 
" Pickwick Papers," first number issued in March, 1836; 
" Oliver Twist," 1838; " Nicholas Nickleby," 1839; " The Old 
Curiosity Shop," 1840; " Barnaby Rudge," 1841; "American 
Notes," 1842; "Martin Chuzslewit," 1843; "The Christmas 
Carol," 1843; " Dombey and Son," 1846; "David Coppertield," 
1849; " Bleak House," 1852; " Hard Times," 1854; " Little 
Dorrit," 1855; "A Tale of Tzvo Cities," 1859; "The Uncom- 
mercial Traveller^ 1861; " Great Expectations" 1861; " Our 
Mutual Friend," 1864; "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (un- 
finished). Died at Gad's Hill, June 6th, 1870. 

f~ ][~~^HE course of English fiction, in so far as we 
have hitherto been able to trace it, has been 
-"- marked by very little that resembles scientific 
development. Beyond tracing certain relations between 
its parts, and certain derivative impulses, the principle 
of evolution is but feebly present, and only the ped- 
antry of criticism will be much concerned about the 
matter. It will content the critic, who is more inter- 
ested in the quality of art than the study of its origins, 
to remark the culmination of romantic fiction in Scott, 
the rise of domestic fiction in Jane Austen, and the 
appearance of a new kind of realism in Thackeray. If 
any general term can be employed to define the par- 
ticular place of Dickens in fiction, we may say that he 

98 



CHARLES DICKENS 99 

is a democratic novelist. In a sense scarcely applicable 
to any other novelist, he was a man of the people and 
wrote for the people. He had a real depth and inten- 
sity of popular sympathy, of which we find but oc- 
casional evidence in either Scott or Thackeray. In 
the course of his career he was attracted by many forms 
of art — the historical or pseudo-historical, for ex- 
ample, as illustrated in " Barnaby Rudge " and " A 
Tale of Two Cities " ; but the driving force of his 
genius was at all times a passionate sympathy with 
democracy. He is the spokesman of the masses ; he 
writes for them, and lives by their praise ; he is under- 
stood of the common people, and delights in kinship 
with them ; and he may thus claim to have been the 
creator of the democratic novel. 

The early life and associations of Dickens are re- 
sponsible for this outstanding feature of his genius. 
He owed nothing to gentle birth or early culture, as 
Scott and Thackeray did. He was educated at no 
public school and was a graduate of no university. A 
certain scorn of classical education is visible in his 
earlier books ; Mr. Feeder, B.A., and Dr. Blimber, 
with his incessant prosing about the Romans, are the 
types he gives us of the instructors of youth. He 
makes no apology whatever for his ignorance of art. 
He rather prided himself upon it. When in mid-life 
he visited Italy and looked upon those supreme crea- 
tions of art, of which a truly great man had once said, 
" We are the shadows, and these the realities," he saw 
little in them that did not excite his ridicule. He had 
no respect for any kind of rank, and little understand- 
ing of the finer qualities developed in fine natures by 
its social obligations. These and many similar limita- 

iLOFC. 



100 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

tions and defects are clear enough in his writings ; but 
they are the defects of his qualities. They certainly 
will be passed over lightly by any generous critic, who 
remembers the narrowness and deprivation of Dick- 
ens's early life. The thing to be wondered at, the thing 
to be grateful for, is that Dickens kept so sweet a 
temper, that he was so little soured by the flagellations 
of unjust fate, and that against his democratic passion, 
which unquestionably worked strongly and success- 
fully in the social regeneration of his time, nothing 
worse can be charged than some narrowness of view 
and some defects of taste. 

It is, in truth, little less than miraculous that with so 
precarious an equipment Dickens should have won his 
way to fame at all. When the elder Dickens was asked 
where his son had been educated, he replied with true 
Micawber cheerfulness, " Ha, ha ! he may be said to 
have educated himself." The son, in looking back on 
the same circumstance, has another comment. " It 
is wonderful to me," he says, " how I could have been 
so easily cast away. It is wonderful to me that no one 
had compassion enough on me — a child of singular 
abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily 
or mentally — to suggest that something might have 
been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place 
me at any common school." It is difficult to acquit 
the parents of Dickens of something like criminal cal- 
lousness or carelessness in this matter. The elder 
Dickens unfortunately belonged to that shiftless class 
which his son described as having " come to regard in- 
solvency as the normal state of mankind, and the pay- 
ment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out." 
Dickens has often been blamed for some lack of filial 



CHARLES DICKENS 101 

reverence in caricaturing his father as Micawber ; those 
who read the story of his childhood will agree that he 
took but a light revenge for a course of neglect and 
humiliation which he never should have endured. How 
deeply the whole matter rankled in his heart we may 
judge from the pathetic circumstance that the worst 
humiliations of his childhood were concealed from his 
wife until long after marriage, and he could never 
bring himself to speak about them to his own children. 
Let us try to conceive the situation : a delicate and 
sensitive child virtually orphaned ; reared amid scenes 
of dubious morality and shiftless waste ; cast upon the 
world with as little compunction as Rousseau displayed 
in the disposal of his offspring ; unacquainted with any 
wise example either of virtue or religion, and deriving 
any sanction of right conduct which he was able to 
attain from native intuition and natural impulse ; a 
bright imaginative boy condemned to the life of a 
miserable drudge, doing the most menial work among 
the most uncongenial associates, and doing this work 
at an age when most children are busy at their games. 
It is hard to conceive a childhood more sad or more 
deplorable ; yet he has told us that his parents were 
as entirely satisfied with his condition as though he 
had been a youth of twenty, " distinguished at a gram- 
mar school, and going to Cambridge." He has also 
told us that, for all the care exercised over him by 
those whose duty to him was the clearest, he might 
have been a little vagabond or a little thief. It was no 
exaggeration. The child had no home ; his father was 
in prison for debt, and the only holiday from sordid 
toil he knew at one time was to spend Sunday in the 
prison with his father. He had no friends ; he lived a 



102 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

lonely life in a great city, from his weekly wage of 
eight shillings providing himself with food and lodging 
as he could. But the solitary child had a precocious 
manliness about him as pathetic as it was extraordi- 
nary. He endured his hardships gallantly, and in a 
spirit of true heroism. And he had what was rarer than 
fortitude — a certain sunniness of nature, which re- 
mained undarkened by misery, and was proof against 
the bitterness instilled by his misfortune. His light- 
heartedness, his cheerful optimism, his humour, were 
derived from his father; they were the only legacy 
that ever came to him from that least parental of all 
parents. It is not wonderful that such experiences 
should have developed to the highest point an impas- 
sioned sympathy with the poor ; the singular thing is 
that he kept his geniality. It is another illustration of 
that curious paradox which may be observed so fre- 
quently in human life, that the people most acquainted 
with grief are the optimists, and the people who know 
least about it are the pessimists. 

To the familiar beatitudes endorsed by human ex- 
perience another should be added: Blessed is humour, 
for he who can laugh at life shall be spared the bitter- 
est tears of life. Humour, which is in its essence 
kindly, kept the discarded child from despair ; and 
there was added to this gift of humour an extraordinary 
power of observation, which provided him with interest 
even in his darkest days. It is impossible to imagine 
the moment when Dickens was not interested in human 
life. In later life, when he moved along the lighted 
ways of fame, he naturally felt, with some bitterness, 
his early disadvantages ; but it is probable that even 
as a drudge in a blacking factory he was too busy 



CHARLES DICKENS 103 

observing the curious life around him to make much 
complaint. He was silently engaged in studying the 
pathos and farce of decayed gentility — its pride, its 
shifts, its sorrows, its ambitions. Extravagant traits 
of character, touches of the grotesque and pathetic in 
the creatures with whom he was associated, were treas- 
ured in his memory, and were produced in later years 
with marvellous fidelity. No man presented a more 
sensitive surface to life, and yet by some strange al- 
chemy the pictures printed most indelibly on his mem- 
ory were not sordid. Contrast, for example, the way 
in which Tolstoi paints a Russian prison, and the pic- 
ture Dickens draws of the Marshalsea. Tolstoi puts 
into the foreground objects which it is brutalising and 
degrading even to remember; he forces his reluctant 
reader to look on the worst kind of foulness ; he leaves 
no element of filth or squalor to implication, but insists 
upon its categorical exposure. Dickens, on the con- 
trary, though he had the keenest cause of hatred and 
abhorrence for the old Marshalsea prison, can bring 
himself to speak of it in a kindly temper. " People 
are not bad because they come there," he writes in 
" Little Dorrit." " I have known numbers of good, per- 
severing, honest people come there through misfortune. 
They are almost all kindhearted to one another." The 
difference between these two great writers is one of 
temperament. The absence of humour in Tolstoi makes 
him a pessimist ; its presence in Dickens makes him 
an optimist. Each speaks the truth, the one in bitter- 
ness, the other in love ; but the larger truth is with 
Dickens, as the larger truth must always be with the 
man of genial vision. Humour is essential to sanity ; 
no sane and entirely lucid vision of life is possible with- 



104 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

out it. It is, in fact, a species of grace by which men 
are saved, and the thing from which it saves them is the 
pit of pessimism. 

Dickens was saved from pessimism by his humour ; 
he also found deliverance from the worst pressure of 
early adversity by a genuine love of imaginative lit- 
erature. He has given us a list of his early reading: 
it includes the works of Smollett, Fielding, and Gold- 
smith, "Don Quixote," "Gil Bias," "The Arabian 
Nights," " The Spectator," " The Tatler," and a vol- 
ume of Mrs. Newbold's " Farces." He draws an in- 
teresting picture of himself as " not a very robust 
child, sitting in by-places near Rochester Castle, with 
a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Piper, and San- 
cho Panza." It was a fortunate accident which pro- 
vided the boy with such reading; it was still more 
fortunate for him that his taste was so far formed by 
these great authors when he entered on his term of 
London drudgery that he was able to find in them a 
refuge from the outward miseries of his life. His out- 
ward life was the life of the street urchin ; his inner 
life, the life of the imaginative artist. In his lonely 
London garret he kept glorious company, and was least 
alone when most solitary. By virtue of imagination 
he could shut the door at will upon the world, and we 
may be sure that the outer life seemed less real to him 
than the inner life. It was so throughout his career; 
and the child with head full of Partridge and Sancho 
Panza was father of the man who wept and laughed 
with excitement over the creatures of his own novels. 

It has often been remarked that in mature life Dick- 
ens read little ; that " few really great men can have 
had so narrow an intellectual scope " ; that even in the 



CHARLES DICKENS 105 

most lenient use of the phrase he was not at any time a 
cultured man ; but there was a sense in which he did 
not need books, because he habitually lived in a ro- 
mance-world of his own. One is not sure after all 
whether the kindliest circumstance could have provided 
him with a better means of education than he discov- 
ered for himself. A stricter scheme of culture might 
have meant a diminished vigour of imagination. If 
he had but a few books, they were all great books ; 
and it might be said of him, as it was said of Abraham 
Lincoln, that " the poverty of his library was the wealth 
of his life." He himself has been at pains to tell us 
that little as Fielding and Smollett seemed suited for 
the reading of a child, yet whatever there was of evil 
in their pages was not there for him. What did exist 
for him was robust and noble English, matchless skill 
in the analysis of character and the delineation of man- 
ners, keen insight, manly sympathy, jovial laughter, a 
world where the creatures were no mere puppets in a 
show, but authentic human beings, overflowing with 
genuine vitality and energy. Much as Dickens re- 
gretted his lack of schooling, it may be doubted if any 
school would have permitted him a scheme of reading 
so inspiring and so catholic, for the thing least studied 
and oftenest contemned in public schools is English 
literature, and particularly that special form of litera- 
ture from which Dickens learned his art as novelist. 

Not only was " the intellectual scope " of Dickens 
narrow, but the very nature of his life narrowed also 
his range of observation. His power of observation 
was intense rather than wide. He is pre-eminently the 
novelist of cities ; or, it would be correcter to say, of a 
city — the great metropolis where his life was spent, 



106 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

and which n/3 man ever loved more heartily. He would 
have endorsed with eagerness the opinion of old Sam- 
uel Johnson that there is no place like London to live 
in. He loved, like Johnson, to stand amid the great 
tide of life which flows through Fleet Street, and pre- 
ferred the knowledge of men to the knowledge of 
nature. But for that very reason the sphere of his 
observation was severely limited. He knew the Cock- 
ney thoroughly. He could reproduce perfectly his mis- 
pronunciations, his odd narrowness of view, his alert 
shiftiness, his smartness, his power of repartee. He 
loved the by-ways of the great city, and found in them 
infinite food for tragedy and mirth. Probably no man 
ever knew London so well. Like Sam Weller, his 
knowledge of London was " extensive and peculiar." 
His most exhilarating amusement was to walk for 
hours in its crowded streets, and to penetrate in semi- 
disguise its obscurer haunts, where the well-dressed 
Londoner is never seen save by accident, and then is 
only too eager to escape from the possible perils of his 
environment. 

But when Dickens penetrated the splendid squares 
of the aristocracy, and still more when he ventured into 
the silence of the country lanes and the sleepy streets 
of the villages and hamlets of England, he was out of 
his element. His fine lords and ladies have no authen- 
tic vitality about them, and his village scenes have the 
air of elaborate stage-pictures. The first impressions 
are always the deepest, and the first impressions of 
Dickens's life were of squalid poverty, of poor men's 
shifts and poor men's uncomplaining heroism, of the 
half-humourous, half-pathetic adventures of men down 
on their luck — Micawbers who were always waiting 



CHARLES DICKENS 107 

for something' to turn up, and debtors who managed 
to keep a " stiff hupper lip " even in the Fleet prison. 
Many of the landmarks of Dickens's London have 
already disappeared, and others are rapidly disappear- 
ing. The very language in which his Cockneys con- 
versed has changed, and has vanished with the old 
coaches, the old hostelries, and the old chop-houses. 
So much is this the case that it has even been said that 
in fifty years' time Dickens's works will have become 
unintelligible to the average Englishman. This is, 
however, a prophecy which is likely to prove a most 
gratuitous form of human error, for great books live, 
not by their form alone, but often in spite of it ; and if 
Burns can survive in spite of a dialect which Scots- 
men no longer speak, and imperfectly comprehend, it 
is not likely that any change in the local conditions of 
life will render Dickens obsolete. 

This extraordinary power of observation in Dickens 
is the cardinal quality of his art. It is so vivacious, so 
sensitive, so ceaselessly active, that it may rank as 
the distinctive quality. How much he sees, and how 
vividly, is revealed even in his dullest page to a degree 
that would be remarkable in the pages of many other 
writers who have a claim to brilliance. Take, for ex- 
ample, the picture of the Plornish family at home in 
Bleeding Heart Yard in " Little Dorrit." " Little Dor- 
rit " is far from being his best book, and the Plornish 
family is little more than a thumb-nail sketch, but 
nothing could be more lifelike. Here is a brief cate- 
gory of things he sees, and makes us see. A hand 
painted on the wall (depicted with " a ring and a most 
elaborate nail of genteel form ") points the way to the 
apartment where the Plornish family reside. The door 



108 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

was opened by " a woman with a child in her arms, 
whose unoccupied hand was hastily rearranging the 
upper part of her dress. This was Mrs. Plornish, 
and this maternal action was the action of Mrs. Plor- 
nish during a large part of her waking existence." To 
the question whether Mr. Plornish is at home, she re- 
plies, " Well, sir, not to deceive you, he's gone to look 
for a job." " Not to deceive you " was her method of 
speech. She is most gratified when Clennam takes his 
hat off, because few people think it worth while to re- 
move their hats in a poor man's house ; "but people 
think more of it than people think." Plornish, being 
a man of slow speech, leaves the conversation to his 
wife, repeating the last parts of her sentences after her 
" as if he were making responses at church." " Me 
and Plornish says, ' No, Miss Dorrit, no ill-conveni- 
ence " (Plornish repeated "no ill-convenience"), 
and so forth. When Mrs. Plornish is not speaking, she 
is " hushing the baby from side to side, and laying her 
chin upon the little hand," and feigning " to bite the 
fingers of the little hand as she kissed it." How truly 
all this is observed ! Every touch in the picture counts, 
and is done with a sort of pre-Raphaelite accuracy. 
There is no trick of speech or manner that escapes the 
observation of Dickens ; the little group stand focussed 
for an instant in a ray of light so intense that once 
seen they can never be forgotten. And this gift never 
fails Dickens ; it gives vitality to his lightest sketch, 
truth and vivacity to his most careless page, and is the 
element from which is born a creative art unmatched 
by even the greatest of his rivals. 

Among the books which delighted his childhood, 
" The Arabian Nights " will be noticed ; and Mr. Gis- 



CHARLES DICKENS 109 

sing has observed that Dickens makes more allusions 
to this book in his novels than to any other book or 
author. The fact is suggestive, for it indicates another 
tendency of Dickens's genius — the tendency to fanci- 
fulness, to romance, to the grotesque. His chief faults 
are the result of this tendency, and they are faults 
which he himself did not perceive, and therefore made 
no effort to restrain. A writer of fiction usually 
chooses one of two methods — the method of plain 
veracity, or the method of fanciful romance: Dickens 
uses both. In such a study as the Plornishes all is 
veracious, for all is truly observed. Can we say the 
same thing of Little Nell or Oliver Twist or Em'ly, or 
even Bill Sikes? Pip and Joe Gargery are truly ob- 
served ; but who does not feel that Miss Havisham is 
a purely fanciful figure, having not the least resem- 
blance to reality? We can readily bring ourselves to 
believe in the existence of Oliver Twist, but that he 
should have remained so preternaturally innocent amid 
the scenes of infamy where his early lot is cast is quite 
incredible. Sikes the burglar is real enough in the 
moment of his great crime; but Sikes shouting to the 
infuriated crowd, " Wolves tear your throats ! " is a 
mere stage-villain, using language which no hunted 
murderer ever did or ever could use. One can imagine 
that there sat on the shoulder of Dickens an irrespon- 
sible Puck or Ariel of pure fancifulness, perpetually 
misleading him. Passages of the most thorough obser- 
vation alternate with passages of impossible romance. 
At one moment life is seen with the most lucid sanity 
of vision, the next moment it is a phantasmagoria. 
He is not content with plain narrative for long — the 
genii of " The Arabian Nights " are sure to intrude 



110 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

themselves. The normal and the typical are constantly 
thrust aside to make way for the abnormal and the 
erratic. His books often remind us of those curious 
mirrors which are hung outside the doors of certain 
eating-houses, which reflect the face of the passer-by 
as either preposterously thin or ludicrously fat. And 
yet all the time Dickens retains his power of holding 
a perfectly undeflected mirror up to nature; he can 
observe life with a minute truth of detail if he likes; 
the error is clearly not of power, but of perversity. 
He so wills it, and his better gift of accurate 
observation is constantly displaced by his lower gift of 
fancifulness, without the least perception on his part 
of confusion in form, method, and ideal. 

Had Dickens kept the two methods distinct, there 
would have been no cause for complaint. The fairy 
tale and the realistic novel are both perfectly admis- 
sible and accepted forms of art. It is when the effort 
is made to unite the two that the lucidity of art is lost. 
What reader of " Great Expectations," that most 
delightful of all his books, has not wished Miss 
Havisham out of it, or at least wished that she were 
other than she is? All that goes on beneath Joe 
Gargery's humble roof delights us by its simple truth ; 
all that happens in the darkened rooms of Satis House 
offends us by its manifest untruth. We can even 
accept the convict part of the story as not incredible, 
although it is melodramatic; but Miss Havisham 
belongs to the land of nightmare. The influence of 
this tendency to the unreal and fantastic upon Dick- 
ens's genius was unfortunately a growing tendency, 
and was injurious to his art in every way. He came 
to delight in the grotesque for its own sake. It became 



CHARLES DICKENS 111 

increasingly difficult for him to describe any character 
without exaggeration. He worked in crude colours, 
neglecting and scorning the finer gradations of endur- 
ing art. The habit of caricature grew upon him, and, 
as was natural, the power of genuine portrait-painting 
decayed, for the one is destructive of the other. 

It is not only the fancifulness of " The Arabian 
Nights " which colours the genius of Dickens — there 
is also an eager taste for melodrama. His earliest 
passion was for the stage. He showed himself in later 
life an accomplished actor, and it may be said that 
with few exceptions his books were written with a 
constant eye to stage-effect. Hence he is constantly 
guilty. of over-emphasis or purposed exaggeration in 
his characters. Probably this is the reason why it is 
not always easy for people who read Dickens with 
extreme pleasure in youth to return to him with 
anything like the same degree of pleasure in mature 
life. The growth of observation and the philosophic 
temper in themselves has taught them that there is 
little in actual human life or essential human nature 
quite like the delineations of Dickens. The frequent 
lack, of firm and lucid outline, of fundamental sincerity 
and truth, in his characters is perceived. His rogue 
is always too much of a rogue ; his simpleton comes 
too near to imbecility. It is plainly contrary to nature 
that Pickwick should have been so utterly a noodle, 
and Pecksniff so preposterous a hypocrite. About 
too many of the characters of Dickens there lingers 
the odour of the footlights, the sense of something 
inherently false and meretricious. We know the 
moment Pecksniff appears what he will say and do, 
and we know that he will never, by any chance, sur- 



112 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

prise us with a touch of nature. We know these 
things by the sure instinct which instructs the lover 
of transpontine drama that the villain of the piece will 
never deviate into momentary virtue, nor the virtuous 
and afflicted heroine be guilty of a single act of weak- 
ness. That this is not the method of the greatest 
imaginative writers scarcely needs saying. The art 
of Shakespeare and Fielding is so subtly tempered that 
there is the perfect illusion of reality. The creatures 
of their pens may be sublime or comic, but in neither 
case do they overstep the modesty of nature. But 
Dickens makes no effort and no pretence of keeping 
within the modesty of nature. He uses all the tricks 
and artifices of the stage to attract and sustain atten- 
tion — making much of a deformity of either mind or 
body, obtruding the abnormal, treasuring and making 
much of odd sayings, and repeating them at every turn 
until they become the catchwords for laughter and 
applause. That he is a humorist none will question, 
but his method belongs rather to broad farce than to 
humour ; and one is not sure whether he would not be 
more correctly described as a great master of farce 
than a great humorist — the greatest lord of farce who 
ever lived. 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 

SO far we have studied the deficiencies of Dickens ; 
we may now turn to the more congenial task of 
studying his greatness. It must not be assumed 
that the theatrical element in the ""genius of Dickens 
implies any lack of sincerity in his character. He was 
as sincerely theatrical in his method of portraying life 
as he was sincerely upright in living it. It was the 
extreme vividness of his own perceptions that led him 
to over-emphasize all he felt and saw. In 'his case the 
epigram that " the style is the man " finds an unusual 
degree of warrant. Just as he writes jerkily, 'yet with 
a wonderful vividness, so he saw life, as it were, by a 
series of electric flashes. A higher power of intense 
imagination few men have had. Give him a piece of 
real drama, and it lives. In this singular power of 
intensity nothing in English fiction can surpass the 
murder of Nancy or the death of Bill Sikes in " Oliver 
Twist." We are not surprised to find that it greatly 
exhausted him to read these scenes ; he read them as 
an actor. And in saying this we unconsciously dis- 
cover the secret of his power. 

Dickens had by nature the temperament of the actor 
in its highest perfection, and with all its limitations. 
That temperate sanity of view which surveys a great 
drama as a whole he did not possess ; but his whole 
soul was in his part. He built it up sometimes by 

113 



114* MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

touches which ar.e felt to be meretricious, oftener by 
really great strokes of art. After a while we forget 
the meretricious, just as we become reconciled to the 
strut of a supreme actor when his art absorbs us. And 
it is quite certain that the actor himself has forgotten 
it. He is so fascinated by the vital reality of the thing 
he simulates that all power of self-criticism is dead. 
The least power of self-criticism would have showed 
him the shocking pathos of three-fourths of his death- 
bed scenes, and the occasional absurdity of his horrors, 
such as the death of Krook by spontaneous combus- 
tion. We did not see it once — when the spell of Dick- 
ens was first strong upon us ; but we rarely fail to see 
it later on. But Dickens did not see it at all. " The 
garish lights " of the world's great stage were in his 
eyes ; its applause rang in his ears. It was all real to 
him ; and in the intoxication of boundless praise from 
a multitude as much under the spell of his vivid imagi- 
nation as he himself was, there was no one just enough 
or wise enough to point out the errors which we all can 
recognise to-day. 

Writing as a supreme master of farce — the Shake- 
speare of farce, we might say — it was natural that he 
should fall into the occasional error of vulgarity. 
Taste is something that can never be really acquired: 
either a man has it or he has it not. Dickens certainly 
did not possess it, and it is probably a good thing for 
us that he did not. A Dickens brought up with care, 
duly drilled in the etiquette which is supposed to con- 
stitute good form, and mellowed by the traditional 
spirit of a great university, might still have been a 
great author, but he would not have been the Dickens 
we know. He would no doubt have written better 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 115 

English, but he would have written worse books. He 
certainly would not have chosen his themes from the 
most sordid and tragic annals of great cities. As it 
was, the one school Dickens knew was the London 
streets. He might have said that he was educated in 
the University of London in the same sense that 
Browning said he was educated in the University of 
Italy. He was unhappy out of London. He could 
find inspiration nowhere else. He discovers that the 
genius which flowed freely in London will hardly stir 
at all in Genoa, and he has to come back to London 
before he can do his work with ease. He had, as we 
have seen, a preference for the seamy and sordid side 
of life ; it was that which he knew best. He fails when 
he tries to paint a prosperous merchant, he fails still 
more egregiously when he tries to paint a lord; but 
his Wellers, poor Joes, and Wilfers, his loungers at 
inn-doors, lawyer's clerks in shabby coats, bailiffs, 
ruffians, tide-waiters, and Bohemians of the dingy and 
mangy order, are all perfect. They are all vulgar 
creatures, and now and then they are depicted with a 
vulgar touch. Manners and .customs of forty years 
ago were more vulgar than they are now, and much 
must be allowed for this. Besides which it must be 
remembered that farce itself always borders on vul- 
garity, and it is asking too much of " a special corres- 
pondent for posterity," as Mr. Bagehot has called 
Dickens, who makes it his chief aim to paint low life 
in the London of the fifties, that he shall never by any 
chance touch his picture with a breadth which is more 
after the manner of Hogarth than Du Maurier. 

" Here is a writer," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
" who is realistic if ever any writer was, in the sense 



116 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of having closely observed the lowest strata of city 
life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the 
most abandoned men and women in the dregs of so- 
ciety, who has invented many dreadful scenes of pas- 
sion, lust, seduction, and debauchery, and yet in forty 
works and more you will not find a page which a mother 
need withhold from her grown daughter." It was the 
same characteristic which struck Thackeray when he 
spoke of " the sweet and unsullied page " of his great 
rival. There is also a certain high-mindedness which 
holds him and us above any defiling contact with the 
most defiling themes. Of how many novelists can 
this be said? Where else is there a writer who has 
descended so deep into the underground world of a 
great city, the dim and populous infernos of lust and 
crime, and yet has brought us back to the daylight with 
nothing but pity in our hearts, and not a single im- 
pure image in our minds? 

But much more than this may be said. Not only 
are we none the worse for these incursions into the 
sordid and tragic, but we are positively the better. 
Fagin and the Artful Dodger, Nancy and Bill Sikes, 
are not pleasant associates, but they do us no harm. 
For Dickens had much more than purity — which is, 
after all, but a negative quality — he had intense powers 
of pity and sympathy. There is a certain benignity 
about him, a radiant humanity. I suppose that no 
English writer of any period has ever been so widely 
loved, and this personal affection which he excited is 
a testimony to his benignity. Admiration for a book 
is often very far from implying love for its author; 
but from the first Dickens was loved. Hosts of the 
common people felt that they had in him a champion, 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 117 

if not a deliverer — a friend who understood their woe, 
if he could do little to ameliorate it. Even so cautious 
and cold a critic as Jeffrey completely loses his head, 
and shouts blessings on the man who has made him 
weep delicious tears. In fact, the works of Dickens 
were never truly criticised ; if they had been, he might 
have learned how to better both his method and style. 
He was received with almost frantic joy, and the 
demonstration never sensibly diminished during his 
life. Men felt incapable of criticising a writer who 
had moved them so deeply. And as we reread his 
books we begin to understand the reason of it all. He 
may err in taste and err in art, but he never errs in 
sympathy. He depicts even his Nancy, vulgar drab 
as she is, in such a way that our hearts ache for her. 
With the exception of his deliberate hypocrites, who 
are always overdrawn, and therefore not convincing, 
he rarely touches any character without showing us 
something that may be loved or pitied in it. He fails 
most palpably when he sets himself to be deliberately 
pathetic. Then we hear the pump going hard behind 
the tears, and we come near to mockery. He is hardly 
to be blamed for it ; the public he wrote for saw nothing 
maudlin in it, and certainly he saw nothing. He 
obeyed the standard he had set up, and it was a stand- 
ard which every one in his day approved. But in the 
sympathy that surprises us by felicitous touches he 
never fails ; it was a boundless element bathing all his 
books. There is certainly no writer who approaches 
him in this benignity of spirit, which invokes and 
claims personal affection in the reader. 

One result of this intense sympathy we all acknowl- 
edge. It stands to the eternal honour of Dickens 



118 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

that he did much to infuse a more humane spirit into 
the general life of the people. It was his pen that 
abolished the debtor's prison, public executions, and 
the worst abuses of the parochial and private school 
systems — to speak only of reforms that are generally 
acknowledged as his handiwork. If there were any 
means of arriving at an accurate estimate, we should 
certainly find that he did much more than this. It is 
impossible to say how much of human kindliness has 
been invoked by such a story as the " Christmas 
Carol." The hardest man who reads it, even though 
he be a veritable Scrooge, cannot help asking himself 
who is his neighbour, and diligently inquiring until he 
finds a Tiny Tim in need of a Christmas dinner. The 
most callous man who has read the death of poor Joe 
can scarcely help looking at the tattered crossing- 
sweeper of the London streets with a softer glance. 
To accomplish these results was to perform the highest 
offices of both religion and benevolence. Satire and 
irony alone can never attain such results. They sting, 
they wound, they arouse indignation or vituperation, 
but they do not arouse general outbursts of sympathy. 
It needs love to do these things, and Dickens was pre- 
eminently a lover of his fellow-men. Nor is it pos- 
sible to regret the disabilities of his early life when 
we remember these things. No man who had 
not known the miseries he had known could ever have 
written as he did. For him, as for every man of 
genius who has profoundly moved us, it is true that 
" he learned in suffering what he taught in song." 
The poor and the harassed, the people of no account 
who know sordid struggles and mean anxieties, will 
always love Dickens, and the house which has no other 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 119 

books will have his. Above all things, he was a novel- 
ist of the people — far more so than Scott or Fielding 
or Thackeray, or any other writer with whom he may 
be compared. To reach the people the pen need not 
be superfine, but it is certain that it must be held by a 
hand that has a kindly heart behind it. If sometimes 
the fastidious may reproach such a writer with vul- 
garity, is it not a very light charge, not worth con- 
sideration, when we remember the affection, pity, and 
sympathy he has excited and stimulated into active 
forces which have penetrated the whole mass of society 
with the spirit of a most serviceable humaneness? 

It is impossible for us to-day to understand the kind 
of feeling with which Dickens was regarded by his 
contemporaries. It was a cult, a passion, an adora- 
tion, a fanaticism. Every one recalls the story of the 
old gentleman on his death-bed who thanked God for 
the likelihood of living till the next number of " Pick- 
wick " came out. Not so familiar, but equally signifi- 
cant, is the story of the man who rode several miles at 
midnight that he might awaken his friend with the 
great and welcome news, " Carker's dead ! " The 
method Dickens adopted of publishing his books in 
monthly parts would have been fatal to any writer 
who was not a great creative artist. It was a method 
not without serious disadvantage to his art. It was 
responsible for much of the over-emphasis in his 
characters to which allusion has been made. Between 
the fourth and fourteenth parts of " Martin Chuzzle- 
wit, " Pecksniff might have been forgotten, if his 
hypocrisy had not been restated with every mention 
of his name. It had the worse disadvantage of making 
him extremely sensitive to the approval or disapproval 



120 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of the public, and this led him to make efforts to at- 
tract and please the public at the expense of his art. 
He deliberately alters the plan of " Martin Chuzzle- 
wit " because he is alarmed at the poor sales of its 
early numbers, and he speaks of himself as suffering 
the " horrors of a fever " when the financial results 
of the " Christmas Carol " sink below his expectations. 
For the sake of his own art, its composure, its free- 
dom, its completeness, he would have been wise had 
he never hit upon the device of periodic publication; 
but how much does it say for his immense creative 
genius that it was able to fill his stage with figures so 
vital and fascinating that tens of thousands of people 
waited eagerly for the monthly curtain to be raised. 
We read the new novels of to-day, and after a fashion 
we discuss them ; but who waits for their appearance 
in a fever of expectation, who weeps and laughs over 
them, who is kindled into vigorous love or hatred of 
night to inform a friend of anything that happens in 
them, who is kindled into vigorous love or hatred of 
their personages, and what modern novel could sur- 
vive the dismemberment of monthly publication? 
Dickens achieved these miracles. Yes, he peopled the 
imagination of his countrymen with the creatures of 
his art. He created a personal bond between himself 
and his reader, unique in the entire history of litera- 
ture. When, in later life, he appeared as the public 
interpreter of his own books, he was received with the 
most frantic demonstrations of affection. Never had 
any writer such a hold upon his readers — never again 
can such a phenomenon be anticipated; for that land 
is fortunate which can boast once in many centuries 
the birth and triumph of a writer who can unite the 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 121 

genius to be loved and the genius to create, as they 
were united in the life of Dickens. 

For the last and greatest thing to be observed in 
Dickens is the enormous range of his creative genius. 
When criticism has uttered its last word about his 
faults, the elements of caricature, farce and grotesque 
exaggeration in his characters, the greatest word of all 
remains to be spoken — they live. From what other 
novels could we select a dozen persons so intimately 
true and vital, so clearly defined and real that the 
statesman, the preacher, the journalist, the man in the 
street hearing or uttering their names is at once un- 
derstood and can be in no doubt as to their signifi- 
cance? 

Such a tribute cannot be paid to Fielding or Jane 
Austen, to Scott or to Thackeray ; Shakespeare is the 
only other artist in English literature who can lay 
claim to it. Or to propose a yet severer test: what 
other writer has created figures so vital and so lucid, 
that his books may be read at the same time by the 
boy of twelve and the man of fifty, to the equal de- 
light of each ? Only a few books in any literature sur- 
vive this test — in our own literature " The Pilgrim's 
Progress " and " Robinson Crusoe," for example ; but 
there is scarcely one of Dickens's books of which it is 
not true that persons of all ages and all classes own 
their charm. And where else is there such ease and 
fulness of creative power? At the touch of his pen 
the very stones of the street raise up children to art. 
The mere bulk of his books is extraordinary, the 
greater of them being equal in matter to three or four 
modern novels. The number and the variety of his 
characters are still more astounding. The modern 



m MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

novel is often little more than an enlarged anecdote, In 
which two or three or perhaps half-a-dozen persons 
keep the drama moving - . A story of Dickens is not 
an anecdote, but a history. The actors and person- 
ages in it are numbered by the score. His stage has 
not a few but a throng of actors on it. And yet in 
all this throng there is not one that is not clearly 
individualised — not one who does not speak and act 
in a way intimately his own — not one who is not 
recognised and recollected by the mere mention of his 
name; and there are many who represent with such 
accurate detail definite defects and qualities, distinct 
tendencies, virtues, vices, follies, tragedies, humours, 
and eccentricities that they have become the symbols 
and parables of things that happen in the universal life 
of man. The writer of whom these things is true is 
secure of fame. His genius has inwoven itself into 
the life of his race, and is a part of its tradition. 

He is a portion of the loveliness 

Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear 

His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress 

Sweeps through the dull, dense world, compelling there 

All new successions to the forms they wear. 

Tastes may change, new gods be set up in the 
market-place, new reputations rise and wane, but the 
time can never come when the great creative artist 
is dethroned and finally forgotten. It is as a great 
creative artist Dickens takes his place with the immor- 
tals ; and so long as men live not by bread alone, but 
by the food of the imagination — so long as men know 
how to laugh at pure absurdity, to revel in the jovial 
fun of high spirits and audacious youth, to thrill and 



THE GREATNESS OF DICKENS 123 

sadden at the tragedies of life, to feel pity, mirth, and 
love — so long will the writings of Charles Dickens 
live ; and his satire on things evil will serve the cause 
of virtue, his message of benignity will continue to 
enlarge the scope of human sympathy, and his vigorous 
humanity will reinforce the inherent altruism of man- 
kind to a yet wider and completer social service. 



XI 
THE BRONTES 

Charlotte Bronte, bom at Thornton, Yorkshire, April 21st, 
1816. Emily Bronte, bom at Haworth, Yorkshire, 181S; Anne 
Bronte, 1S20. Poems by the three sisters published 1846. 
"Jane Eyre," published 1847; "Shirley," 1849; "Villette," 
I ^53i " Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte, published after 
her death. Emily Bronte died 1848; Anne Bronte, 1849; 
Charlotte Bronte, March 31st, 1855. 

IT is late in the clay to find anything new to say of 
the Brontes, yet there are still things which may 
be said with profit. One thinks of them with the 
astonishment and pity which Wordsworth felt for 

Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, 
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride. 

And the imagination associates them with Chatterton 
because there is a certain vital resemblance, which, 
however, it is fair to add, only the imagination can 
perceive. Each presents the fascinating spectacle of 
a new force springing up suddenly, and with volcanic 
energy, in a place the least likely, and under circum- 
stances the most nearly impossible. For there is 
nothing so elusive, so capricious and uncalculated in 
its movements, as that great hidden stream of literary 
energy which flows under the surface of things, and 
flings up its geyser-fountain from time to time in the 
unvisited solitudes of humanity, in regions beyond the 

124 



THE BRONTES 125 

critical chart and compass. Chatterton, Burns, 
Carlyle, and if we go back far enough, Shakespeare 
too, all afford illustrations of this law of caprice in 
literary energy. The " lord of languages," the mas- 
ter of creative art, often enough is born in places which 
seem to lie remote, beyond the realm of letters. 
Through generations of passionate or tranquil lives 
the force has been slowly accumulating which at last 
takes memorable shape, and blossoms into what we call 
genius. It is like the disease in the oyster which 
makes the pearl ; myriads of healthy bivalves pass un- 
noticed, till at last some curious assimilation in the 
blind life produces something wholly different, the 
lustrous gem for which men search with eager hands. 
Where did the genius come from that suddenly dropped 
its pearl in the drunken chorister's house at Bris- 
tol, or in the lonely, rain-swept parsonage of Haworth ? 
And none can answer ; but when we put such ques- 
tions, we become conscious of that which in the main 
we all forget — the mystery of life. 

Charlotte Bronte lives by three great stories, " Jane 
Eyre," " Shirley," and " Villette." Emily Bronte lives 
by a story which in some of its elements is a still 
greater literary performance, " Wuthering Heights." 
Anne Bronte is remembered only by her comradeship 
with her greater sisters, and the patient, submissive 
tragedy of her life, as Branwell is remembered by the 
sordid tragedy of his. We are irresistibly reminded 
of how strongly the personal equation enters into 
literature when we consider the now familiar history 
of these disastrous lives. We never forget the Bay of 
Spezzia when we read Shelley, nor the long fight with 
death in Rome when we read Keats, nor the lonely end 



126 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

at Missolonghi when we read Byron. How much the 
fame of each of these poets owes to the story of their 
lives it is impossible to determine, but it is clear that 
the personal equation colours all and counts for much. 
It is so in the very nature of things with a poet, 
because his work is of all literary performance the most 
intimately personal, the warm expression of his heart. 
The same thing is true of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. 
Each wrote in prose, but it was a poet's prose. It was 
in neither case literary craftsmanship alone, but strong 
and vivid personal passion, which made their work 
memorable. They were children of the wind and moor, 
full of wild, untameable energy, hating the conventions 
of life, at battle with the order of life, among the very 
first to strike that resonant note of revolt against the 
artificial limitations of a woman's world which is heard 
everywhere in our literature of to-day. Emily's genius 
was violent, tragic, perturbed — a boiling mountain 
stream thundering down lonely hills, and chafing itself 
into dispersion on its way. Charlotte's genius was of a 
calmer order, and had more of sanity in it ; but in her 
soul the same untameable tumult clamoured. Energy 
is the distinguishing note in each. All that they wrote 
was strong with passion, with an indignation like 
Swift's, but more spiritual, because feminine ; less 
bitter, but more impetuous; destitute of savage bru- 
tality, but steeped in the same immense mournfulness. 
It is this genuine virility of passion which has kept 
their work from decay, not less than its great imagi- 
native power and literary perfection. 

The stream that pours through narrow channels has 
not the most volume, but it often has a greater oc- 
casional depth, and displays more astonishing beauties 



THE BRONTES 127 

than the stream which is a great flood moving majes- 
tically to the sea. The life of the Brontes was such a 
stream. We can neither estimate aright the greatness 
nor the limitations of their work without remembering 
the limitations of their life. It is almost vain to visit 
Haworth and the Bronte country to-day to discover 
the material out of which these strange sisters wrought 
their romances, because all is altered. The old church 
has gone. The grey, unsocial-looking parsonage is 
enlarged, and looks almost habitable. A long, many- 
windowed, red-brick Georgian house is pointed out to 
you as the residence of Charlotte's Mr. Helstone ; a 
desolate grange, once moated, with low, iron-studded 
doorways, and weather-worn, mullioned windows, as 
the stage on which another of her scenes was enacted. 
The Black Bull of Haworth where Branwell drank 
himself to death is still there, and the steep, unlovely 
street; but the valleys are full to-day of the smoke of 
factories, and the old order has given place to new. 
One unalterable feature of the landscape still re- 
mains, the wild moors, which begin almost at the door 
of the parsonage, and stretch for miles in lonely 
wastes of purple, and black coombs, and steep ravines, 
filled with the perpetual sound of water and soughing 
winds. It is not every parsonage in a manufacturing 
district that can open its back doors immediately upon 
the freedom and unsullied air of the moors, and truth 
to tell there are many worse parsonages than that in 
which Charlotte and Emily Bronte were reared. For 
souls such as theirs, such a scene must have had many 
compensations. If they were shut away in an obscure 
corner of the world, they were also secreted in the lap 
of Nature. If they saw little of men and women who 



128 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

were capable of stimulating minds like theirs into a 
new glow of thought and impulse, they were of that 
shy and seclusive order to whom social life is a bur- 
densome impertinence rather than a pleasure. And if 
they were forced to know, in intimate association, men 
and women of rude and rough natures, yet it must be 
remembered that there is no race of a more marked 
individuality and strength of nature than this people 
of the Yorkshire dales. 

In happier, or perhaps we should say different, 
circumstances, Charlotte and Emily Bronte might have 
written books of a kindlier humanity and more com- 
prehensive vision, but " Jane Eyre " and " Wuthering 
Heights " had never been written. Indeed, we may 
doubt if, apart from the environment of that tragic 
life at Haworth, they would have written anything; 
for, supreme artists as they are in the craft of litera- 
ture, neither of the sisters was of the order which 
delights in the art of literature for its own sake. Of 
literary sympathy they had little. We do not hear of 
them as taking any pleasure in the study of literature 
in any broad or comprehensive sense. They had none 
of that sensuousness of literary passion which feels a 
fine phrase strike through the mind like the glow of 
wine. They were framed upon severer lines, and 
their sensitiveness was of the tragic order. The first 
book they published was poetry, and here, if any- 
where, we might expect to find the softer glow of 
fancy ; but as with all the other books, it is a hard 
mountain seriousness which forms the bottom strata, 
and the fancy is nothing more than an occasional gleam 
of splendour travelling over moorland solitudes. 
Thus it happens that these four books of the two sis- 



THE BRONTES 129 

ters are of the order which we call to-day " human 
documents." They are not the performance of writers 
who simply have a mild ambition to make books, but 
of passionate hearts agonising to express themselves. 
To these prisoned spirits there was no other means of 
expression. That common boon of human inter- 
course, of which the humblest household may make 
free, was virtually denied them. Old Patrick 
Bronte, when his house was full of young children, 
always dined alone, and he retained the habit all his 
life. Like his daughters, his chief joy was in long 
solitary walks upon the moors. He never asked how 
they spent their time, and apparently never cared. He 
did not share their confidence even in literary matters. 
The only praise he uttered when " Jane Eyre " was put 
into his hands was that it was better than likely ; and 
we can fancy that it was difficult for the old stoic 
to wring out even this grudged praise from his 
closed heart. The sisters themselves toiled in silence 
at their tasks, and never interfered with each other. 
There seems to have been some radical difficulty of 
communion between the members of this tragic house. 
They went upon their " separate and sad " ways with- 
out speech — proud, indomitable, uncommunicative. It 
was not until they took the pen in their hands that 
their hearts were opened ; then all the suppressed pas- 
sion which was consuming them found vent, and what 
neither could say to other they proclaimed in a voice 
of a torrent to the world. 

One of the first things that strikes the visitor to 
Haworth is, that, in spite of the sombre severity of 
Mrs. Gaskell's picture, there was no inherent reason 
why this parsonage on the moors should not have been 



130 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

visited by human cheerfulness and gaiety. Rude as 
the people were, they were warm-hearted, and, as 
Charlotte Bronte's own letters witness, not without an 
excellent capacity for friendship. The place was not 
more lonely than Cowper's Olney, and the neighbours 
far less boorish. It is possible to imagine this lonely 
stone house upon the hill a centre of radiant domes- 
ticity in spite of its contiguity to the grey graveyard 
and the houseless moor. The fact is, that the reasons for 
that cloud of depression which hung over the whole 
life of the sisters must be found elsewhere. Again it 
is the figure of Swift which is recalled by a study of 
the whole picture. In this Irish Patrick Bronte there 
throbbed something of the fierce pride, the immitig- 
able flame of anger and resentment against the world, 
the mad impulse and violence of temper, only held 
clown by the vigilance of an unconquerable will, which 
tortured the life of Swift into insanity. He was a 
dumb Swift, too — striding about the moors in moody 
anger, and unable to find utterance. And he be- 
queathed himself especially to Charlotte and Emily; 
only to them was vouchsafed the power of speech he 
lacked. If ever there was a woman cast in the tragic 
mould, it was Emily Bronte. She and her dog 
Keeper stand distinct before us as types of a certain 
half-noble, half-savage untameableness. For her the 
wildness of the moors was perfectly attuned to the 
wildness of her imagination — the only thing in all 
the world with which she harmonised. What was that 
consuming resentment which burned alike in Swift 
and Patrick Bronte and his two daughters? It 
sprang from the same source in each — the conflict of 
great powers with the solid hindrance of mean impedi- 



THE BRONTES 131 

ments, from a torturing- vision of things coveted but 
denied, from an overmastering sense that the world 
was not justly administered. Nowhere could such 
temperaments have found happiness. It was in the 
power of circumstance to deepen the gloom, perhaps 
to have lightened it, but never to have dispersed it. 
With the keenest, even the bitterest sense of what 
love might be, they were not fashioned for love. With 
an immense power of loving, and a sovereign sense 
that without love life was a thing altogether hideous, 
they neither of them found the love that could master 
them, and melt the rich ore of their natures into noble 
forms. With a professed faith, which they stated the 
more vehemently the more insecure they felt about it, 
they were practically faithless. It was with them as 
with Cowper ; they " at the cross of hope, with hope- 
less hands " were clinging. So that, sad as it is, and 
almost cynical, yet perhaps the truest word which is 
capable of doing most to solve the mystery is Mr. 
Leslie Stephen's : " They afford one more exemplifica- 
tion of the common theory, that great art is produced 
by taking an exceptionally delicate nature, and man- 
gling it slowly under the grinding wheels of the world." 
From these mingled forces of heredity and environ- 
ment there resulted two things which powerfully 
affected the life and art of the sisters. The first was 
the temper in which they regarded life — a temper of 
passionate stoicism. They early learned the truth that 
any real help must be found in themselves. If they 
had any element of rejoicing, it was that they possessed 
unconquerable souls. They summoned themselves for 
battle against the world, and fought indomitably to the 
end. Emily Bronte insisting upon doing her daily 



132 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

house-work when she was visibly dying; Charlotte 
putting aside her rejected manuscripts, and quietly 
beginning another book; poor Branwell crawling out 
of bed that he may die standing, and defiant of 
death, — all show the same spirit. Old Patrick Bronte 
had taught them stoicism to some purpose. With 
Death and Poverty always hungering on their track, 
they never turn from their course ; like those who fling 
their treasures to the wolves, they do but drive the 
faster through the storm. Death is always knocking 
at the door of Haworth parsonage, but they write on 
unmoved. They feel themselves the inheritors of 
calamity ; they expect nothing of the world, but they 
are resolved that the world shall never find them sup- 
pliant. They ask no favour, neither will they give 
any. They know nothing even of dependence on each 
other; each moves in the orbit of her own complete- 
ness. They will not beg of each other, nor crave 
sympathy, nor own weakness each to each; the steel 
armour of pride they wear holds them upright, and has 
no supple hinges at the knee. Charlotte has expressed 
it all with infinite vehemence in " Shirley " when she 
writes : 

Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions, utter no 
remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, 
and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't 
shriek because your nerves are martyrised; do not doubt that 
your mental stomach — if you have such a thing — is strong as 
an ostrich's — the stone will digest. You held out your hand 
for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no conster- 
nation ; close your fingers firmly upon the gift ; let it sting 
through the palm. Never mind : in time, after your hand and 
arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed 
scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson 



THE BRONTES 133 

how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your 
life, if you survive the test, — some, it is said, die under it, — 
you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. . , . Nature is 
an excellent friend in such cases, sealing the lips, interdicting 
utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation — a dissimulation 
often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down to 
sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a 
convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because it is half 
bitter. 

Matthew Arnold has said the same thing of Emily, 
painting in great phrases her indomitable soul, when 
he writes of her — 

Whose soul 
Knew no fellow for might, 
Passion, vehemence, grief, 
Daring, since Byron died, 
That world-famed son of fire — she who sank 
Baffled, unknown, self-consumed : 
Whose too-bold dying song 
Shook like a clarion-blast my souL 

The second result of heredity and environment is 
seen in the art of the sisters. It lacks suavity, com- 
prehensiveness, breadth. It has no luminous outlook 
over wide fields of life. It is not catholic — an art 
which charms and persuades all kinds and conditions 
of men. It moves within the narrowest compass, it 
rarely passes into the firmament of the universal, it 
finds its material solely in this remote dale, and the 
passions and scant external experiences of their isola- 
ted lives. But this does not imply any detraction of 
the art ; it rather makes it appear the more wonderful. 
What was there to write about in the obscure people 
of Haworth? What was there that could interest 



134 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the world in the small perturbations of a needy gover- 
ness? One might as well ask, What was there for 
Burns to write about in a mouse or a daisy, Shelley in 
a skylark, Wordsworth in the small celandine or the 
daffodils beside a nearly nameless lake? It is the 
seeing eye which is needed ; to such an eye the miracle 
of the world is folded in the humblest fragment of it. 
Charlotte Bronte knew Haworth and herself; Emily 
Bronte knew the moors and the rugged men who 
moved across them ; they wrote of what they knew, 
and with such fine art that we know them also. It is 
not the highest art ; the highest combines, from many 
sketches of individuals, some catholic type of man or 
woman which sums up a recognised element, or ele- 
ments, of humanity. Charlotte Bronte does not do 
this. She paints a portrait with inimitable insight and 
fidelity. She expresses her own nature with subtlety 
and passion in all her heroines. In so far she is sub- 
dued by the material she works in, like the dyer's hand 
of Shakespeare's sonnet ; but it is that very circum- 
stance which makes her work so remarkable. That 
one so utterly remote from the great currents of life 
could construct such books as these out of such scenes 
as lay at her door, and such thoughts as burned within 
herself, is one of the marvels of literature. It goes 
to prove what has been often said in many various 
ways, that there are the elements of romance in the 
humblest life if only we knew how to distinguish them, 
as there are in the dewdrop forces which, if liberated, 
might wreck a world. 

When we turn to the work of the Brontes, the task 
of criticism is made difficult by two circumstances, 
one of which has been already mentioned: viz., the 



THE BRONTES 135 

strength of the personal equation in their literary 
performance ; and, secondly, the progress which the 
art of fiction has made since their day. When " Jane 
Eyre " was published there was a general outcry about 
its moral laxity of tone, and one reviewer went so far 
as to hint that no woman who was not an alien from 
her sex could have written it. We have grown 
accustomed to so much stronger meat since those days 
that " Jane Eyre " seems to us a comparatively inno- 
cent confection. When Mrs. Carlyle once met George 
Eliot, she cried with vivacious astonishment, " She, an 
improper female ! " It is much in the same way that 
we laugh quizzically at the denunciations which were 
levelled at the little governess of Haworth when we 
read "Jane Eyre." So far from being improper, it is 
the puritanism of the stiff little figure of Jane Eyre 
which lends humour to the whole conception. The 
nearer Jane comes to temptation, the more rigid does 
she grow. She never loses her self-respect for a 
moment, and in the utmost throes of passion she is 
still so much of a proper person that she addresses 
Rochester as " sir." Judged only as a story, " Jane 
Eyre " is a book which does not well bear second or 
third reading. It lacks dramatic vitality. There is 
an hysteric theatricality about it which offends the 
sober judgment. Rochester is not a really masculine 
creature; he is just the sort of person who might be 
imagined by a lonely and passionate woman who knew 
little of men. And yet, curiously enough, the book 
as a whole belongs to the category of realistic fiction. 
It is realistic in the sense that it records the actual 
thoughts and passions of a woman who is intensely 
alive, in all their crude turbulence and nakedness, and 



136 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

it does this in spite of a plot which is flimsy and melo- 
dramatic, and which has no basis in any facts of life 
as they were known to the writer. The real charm 
of the book is its style. It is written with superb 
vehemence; it is full of a sort of flashing energy of 
phrase; it uses words like weapons, each striking and 
ringing like a clash of swords in some great combat ; 
it is full of noble thoughts nobly expressed; and it 
warms us by its living passion even when it wholly 
fails to convince us by its plot. It is by such qualities 
it made its fame, and it is by such qualities it has re- 
tained it. Much of the book sounds to us to-day 
strained, stilted, and old-fashioned, and hence the 
effort that is needed to reread it ; but when we do begin 
to read it, we are amply repaid by its power of ex- 
pression, and at times almost forget its defects of 
art. 

Probably Charlotte Bronte herself would have con- 
curred in this judgment of her first book, for in her 
subsequent writings these errors are rigorously 
avoided. " Shirley " is from first to last a piece of 
admirable fiction. It is a study of life taken from her 
own doorstep, fresh, vivid, and convincing — a piece of 
excellent impressionism, and at the same time a speci- 
men of highly wrought and finished art. Here she is 
dealing with the life she really knows. There is no 
mistaking the three curates ; they are portraits from 
the life. Her nearest approach to humour is here, 
and there is a healthy vivacity about the writing which 
we miss in the other books. . For a time the cloud is 
lifted from her life. The book reminds us of some 
brief interval of midday sunlight on the moors, be- 
tween the morning gloom and evening sombreness, 



THE BRONTES 137 

when every ridge of the folding hills is touched with 
bright colour, and the air is warmly fragrant, and 
there is the actual song of cheerful birds above the 
solitary waste, where silence and mystery are familiar 
and habitual. We can fancy that she herself wrote it 
in the buoyant mood begotten of her first success. At 
last the tide of misfortune seemed to have turned, and 
larger horizons had opened to the prisoned soul. 
When we reach " Villette," the cloud has fallen again. 
Once more the hills are dimmed and blurred, and the 
rain is sweeping down their scarred valleys, and the 
wind of misfortune is crying desolately on the un- 
peopled moors. The rare geniality of a nature usually 
sombre and reticent is always delightful, and it is this 
sort of geniality which we find and enjoy in reading 
" Shirley." We catch a passing glimpse of what 
Charlotte Bronte might have been had her life been 
more fortunate. Once, when the three sisters were 
walking on the moor with a friend, a sudden burst of 
light filled the sky, and, looking up, they saw a beauti- 
ful parhelion. The three girls stood close together on 
a little ridge of heather, silent and delighted with this 
rare vision of three suns in the changeful sky. " That 
is you," said their friend; "you are the three suns." 
It was only a passing vision, a fair premonitor of evil 
weather, and we can fancy that long before night came 
the storm was once more vehement upon the rainy 
moorland. " Shirley " marks the brief parhelion of 
Charlotte Bronte's life. For a little while the sun has 
warmed her and made her radiant, and the evil weather 
was to follow. 

Any one who cares to know how a novel is created 
cannot do better than study the structure of " Shirley." 



138 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

In a rare and extremely interesting book, " The 
Risings of the Luddites," by Frank Peel, published at 
Heckmondwike in 1888, may be found the history out 
of which Charlotte Bronte took a great part of the plot 
of " Shirley." She would be familiar from childhood 
with these wild stories of wild doings in the Yorkshire 
dales. The attack upon the mill, which is described 
with such admirable art in " Shirley," is little more 
than a narrative of the actual facts as related in Mr. 
Peel's book. With this for a background, and the 
people she knew as artist's models, Charlotte Bronte 
had ample material for a great story. And a great 
story the book is. It is drama, not melodrama. It 
has few of the improbabilities, the girlish crudities, 
which spoil " Jane Eyre." It is wrought with a firm 
hand and infinite spirit. She knew perfectly and 
thoroughly the types of characters which she describes. 
They live for us because they lived for her. Of 
course the book would not be Charlotte Bronte's unless 
there were moments when the narrative is suspended, 
and pages of profound thought and reflection, ex- 
quisitely expressed, lead us aside from the main 
stream of action. But who can regret this when he 
remembers such an inspired passage as that on 
Eve? 

Nature is now at her evening prayers ; she is kneeling before 
those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her 
altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers 
in deserts, for lambs on moors and unfledged birds in woods. 
Caroline, I see her! and I will tell you what she is like; she is 
like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth. 
. . . I saw — I now see — a woman-Titan : her robe of blue 
air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is 
grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from her head 



THE BRONTES 139 

to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. 
Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon; 
through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes 
I cannot picture ; they are clear — they are deep as lakes — they 
are lifted and full of worship — they tremble with the softness 
of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the ex- 
panse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long 
before dark gathers : she reclines her bosom on the ridge of 
Stillboro' moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So 
kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Je- 
hovah's daughter, as Adam was His son. 

There is, perhaps, a suspicion, not amounting to 
evidence, that such a passage as this was written with 
a sense that it was a bit of fine writing, but it may at 
least be said that, rhetorical as it is, it accords perfectly 
with the character of Shirley. A great deal might be 
written, and profitably written, on Shirley's character, 
for it is one of the finest and strongest in the whole 
realm of fiction. Charlotte Bronte meant it to be an 
idealisation of her sister Emily ; and in the passion for 
Nature, the free and independent spirit, the more than 
masculine indomitableness of will and resentment of 
conventions, it is easy to recognise Emily. In none of 
her other writings is there such a sense of masterly 
ease, such freedom and breadth of touch. There are, 
no doubt, scenes in " Villette " which strike a deeper 
note of passion, and, taken by themselves, are more 
memorable. No one who has once read " Villette " is 
ever likely to forget the scene at the theatre, with its 
vivid and overwhelming description of Rachel's act- 
ing — not merely one of the finest pieces of dramatic 
criticism ever written, but one of the most powerful 
pieces of imaginative writing in the language. Nor is 
the self-torture of the sick girl in the long, ghostly, 



140 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

deserted dormitory, and her wanderings in the city, 
through which " the wind thundered strong and hori- 
zontal from north-west to south-east," and her brief 
solace at the confessional, a picture that 'can be readily 
obliterated. If we had to choose half a dozen of the 
greatest scenes from Charlotte Bronte's works, prob- 
ably two-thirds would be drawn from " Villette," for 
nowhere is her imagination so alive, so eager and in- 
tense, as in this last product of her genius. But if 
we had to choose the one book which as a whole does 
the highest justice to her powers, many of us would 
prefer " Shirley." There is a certain unstrained 
freshness in " Shirley " which is delightful after many 
readings ; there is a glow of geniality which keeps it 
sweet; there is a naturalness and ease of depiction to 
which only the greatest artists can attain ; and there 
is that unmistakable sureness of handling which re- 
veals to us that in this case Charlotte Bronte was in 
love with her subject, and wrote it with delight, and 
with a vivid sense of its truth and reality. 

In no other book are the pictures of Nature finished 
with so easy and skilled a touch. There are scores of 
such vignettes a"s these in the book: 

I know how the heath would look on such a day — purple- 
black: a deeper shade of the sky-tint, and that would be livid. 
Yes — quite livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and 
there a white gleam, more ghastly than the livid tinge, which, 
as you looked at it, you momentarily expected would kindle 
into blinding lightning. 

The storm did not break till evening. The hills seemed 
rolled in a sullen mist; and when the rain fell in whitening 
sheets, suddenly they were blotted from the prospect; they 
were washed from the world. 

On Nunnwood slept the shadow of a cloud : the distant hills 



THE BRONTES 141 

were dappled, the horizon was shaded and tinted like mother- 
of-pearl ; silvery blues, soft purples, evanescent greens, and 
rose shades, all melting into fleeces of white cloud, pure as 
azure snow, allured the eye as with a remote glimpse of 
heaven's foundations. The air blowing on the brow was fresh 
and sweet and bracing. 

And of " Shirley " itself we may say that the atmo- 
sphere which bathes it is " fresh and sweet and brac- 
ing." Perhaps that is why we love it best; it gives 
us the most pleasure. 

Of Emily Bronte and the one solitary memorial of 
her genius, " Wuthering Heights," it is hard to speak 
in language which does not seem uncritical and exag- 
gerated. " Wuthering Heights " is one of those books 
about which only two feelings are possible — hearty 
dislike, or intolerant admiration. If a man does not 
feel the greatness of the book, it is a vain task to 
attempt his conversion — if it does not appeal to him, 
it is because he lacks the sense to which the book 
appeals. It is not his fault, it is his misfortune. It 
can hardly be expected that a man who is wholly des- 
titute of or feebly endowed with the poetic fibre, whose 
ideal of natural beauty is placid streams and green 
pastures, who knows nothing of the violent and sav- 
age passions which lie imperfectly curbed under 
civilised exteriors, should in the least understand a 
book which is violent, visionary, daring, unrestrained, 
a wild prose-poem rather than a novel, a thing instinct 
with dangerous, vehement passion, less a book than 
the stormy crying and defiance of a soul at hand-grips 
with fate, and fighting a losing battle without hope. 
And what we are pleased to call " the reading world " 
did not understand it, nor do they understand it yet. 



142 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

To no writer are the touching lines of Mrs. Meynell 
more applicable: 

And if e're you should come down to the village or the town, 
With the cold rain for your garland, and the wind for your 

renown, 
You will stand upon the thresholds with a face of dumb desire, 
Nor be known by any fire. 

Charlotte Bronte had just a sufficient touch of 
wordly shrewdness and restraint to harness her gen- 
ius to a task that knew its limits. But Emily Bronte 
wore no fetter of either prudence or custom. She was 
the child of the storm and lonely moorland — the cold 
rain her garland, the wind for her renown. Is it not 
she who has pictured the soul in heaven crying dis- 
consolately for the lost earth, and at length, flung 
forth by the indignant angels, waking on the cold 
moorland, and weeping for joy to pluck the familiar 
heather once more? One knows not what wild 
thoughts passed through that great brain, and shook 
that unconquerable soul. But in " Wuthering 
Heights " the truest image of Emily Bronte is to be 
found. There is a Titanic greatness about the book; 
its large outlines, fading into uncomprehended 
shadows, at once stimulate and oppress the imagina- 
tion. The very heart of Nature beats in it, the very 
force of Nature throbs through it. Its thoughts and 
images move between the poles of tragic intensity 
and appalling vagueness. We feel the book to be 
something almost unearthly — a thing wrought by 
wizardry, and capable of communicating a strange de- 
light to those who once fall beneath its spell. In its 
passion for Nature it is unequalled. It is the intimate 



THE BRONTES 143 

child of Nature, but Nature in her wildest moods. 
What such an artist as Emily Bronte might have ac- 
complished had her life been prolonged it is impossible 
to say ; but " Wuthering Heights " gives us the impres- 
sion of a genius which might have wrought with 
unrivalled power in the realm of tragic art. That 
any amount of posthumous praise will ever reconcile 
the average mind to so stormy a genius as hers seems 
unlikely, but such praise is at least justified by the 
verdict of so discriminating a critic as Matthew 
Arnold, who links her name with Byron's, and can 
find her no other " fellow for might." It is justified 
also by the immeasurable attraction she has had for 
all who have sought to understand her, and the influ- 
ence which her one book has exercised upon all who 
are capable of appreciating it. " Jane Eyre " will die, 
and even " Shirley " and " Villette " may be for- 
gotten ; it seems likely that " Wuthering Heights," 
inchoate and fragmentary as it is, will survive them 
all. It will live with the " Hyperion " of John Keats, 
as one of the most astonishing torsos of literature. 

" She died in the time of promise," wrote Charlotte 
of her great sister in her touching memoir. " I am 
tired of being enclosed here," wrote Emily in 
" Wuthering Heights," in what reads like a prevision 
of her own fate. " You are sorry for me — very soon 
that will be altered: I shall be sorry for you. I shall 
be incomparably above and beyond you all." For 
Charlotte remained the harder task of living and en- 
during to the end. How she accomplished that task, 
with what pious stoicism and courage, how when the 
sun once more shone upon her in a happy marriage 
it was almost instantly withdrawn in final darkness, 



144 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

all readers of her biography will know. Was Mrs. 
Browning thinking of Charlotte Bronte when she 
wrote in " Aurora Leigh ? " — 

How dreary 'tis for women to sit still 
On winter nights by solitary fires 
And hear the nations praising them far off! 
Too far ! Ay, praising our quick sense of love, 
Our very heart of passionate womanhood, 
Which could not beat so in the veins unless 
Being present also in the unkissed lips 
And eyes undried, because there's none to ask 
The reason they grew moist. 

There is clearly none to whom the words have a more 
obvious and pathetic application. The hosannas of 
the world reached Charlotte Bronte only through the 
darkness of Calvary. 



XII 
GEORGE ELIOT 

George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans, bom at Griff, Warwick- 
shire, November 22nd, i8iq. Translated Strauss's " Leben 
Jesu," 1844. Published " Scenes from Clerical Life," 1856; 
" Adam Bcde," 1859; " The Mill on the Floss," i860; " Silas 
Marncr," 1861; " Romola," 1863; "Felix Holt," 1866; " Mid- 
dlcmarch," 1872; "Daniel Deronda," 1876. Died December 
22nd, 1880. 

WITH George Eliot, as with Dickens, there 
has been of late years a steady set-back of 
fame, and something like an organised sys- 
tem of depreciation among critical authorities. Even 
Mr. Frederic Harrison, who writes as George Eliot's 
friend, and displays a genuine anxiety to make the 
best possible case for her, admits his incapacity to 
re-read " Romola," and to recall " the indefinite linger- 
ing plot, or the precise relations to each other of the 
curiously uninteresting families who talk scandal and 
fuss about in Middlemarch town." Once regarded as 
a Colossus, we are now bidden to believe that George 
Eliot was merely a woman of very energetic and in- 
dustrious mind, who by dint of enormous toil made 
herself a novelist, but was never an artist. But this 
is manifestly untrue. An artist George Eliot was, and 
at times a very great artist. The place of Mrs. Poyser 
in English fiction is as assured as the place of Sam 
Weller; and this is to say that she has accomplished 

145 



146 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the highest work of an artist in creating types and 
persons who are real to us. What is probably meant 
by the statement that George Eliot was not an artist 
is that she was rarely an artist only ; too often she 
spoiled her art by the weight of learning, pedantry, 
and philosophy with which she overlaid it. And this 
is true. For a period of four years in her life George 
Eliot wrote with . consummate art. These were the 
years during which she produced " Scenes from Cleri- 
cal Life " (1858) ; " Adam Bede " (1859) ; " The Mill 
on the Floss" (i860); and "Silas Marner " (1861). 
" Romola," with all its splendid merits, marks her 
decadence as an artist, and betrays exhaustion. In 
" Middlemarch " this decadence is still more pro- 
nounced, and it is complete in the utterly tedious 
" Daniel Deronda." 

The reason of this decadence is plain, and has been 
already indicated. It is that George Eliot took her- 
self too seriously as a teacher to maintain for any 
long period the true freshness and spontaneity of the 
artist. We are quite sure that when Dickens wrote 
the " Pickwick Papers " he had no idea whatever but 
that of thoroughly enjoying himself, and of communi- 
cating his enjoyment to his readers In a less degree 
we are conscious of the same temper in the early writ- 
ings of George Eliot. In the hours when she can 
forget that she is a very learned woman, capable of 
throwing theologians and philosophers in the arena 
of " The Westminster," she writes perfectly, with that 
exquisite pleasure in her own creations which is the 
chief joy of the artist. But from the first we are 
conscious of a wide difference between her and 
Dickens, or any other of her great contemporaries. 



GEORGE ELIOT 147 

Even when she depicts the simple humours of the 
countryside she makes us understand that behind it 
all there is a very definite and subtly argued philos- 
ophy of life. Probably no writer of fiction has ever 
had so reasoned and philosophic a conception of life. 
No one has brought to the task of fiction so serious a 
mind. No'one has taken so high and solemn a view 
of the moral issues of art. But in the end the pedant 
extirpated the artist. If George Eliot had had a 
happier life ; if she had known less of books, and had 
never muddled her mind with philosophy and theol- 
ogy; if she had begun to write twenty years earlier, 
with the idea that the true function of fiction was to 
depict life, and had simply set herself to dramatise 
what she saw in the serio-comedy of human action, 
without too nice an attention to philosophical analysis, 
she would have been a far greater writer. As it was, 
she began to write novels long after most novelists 
have become famous. It was upon the whole a sort 
of miracle that a mind stuffed so full of dull pedantries 
could ever have addressed itself to such a task at all. 
For the four years which I have named she broke 
fairly free from the traditions of all her previous in- 
tellectual activity. Then the old mould gripped her 
mind again, and she relapsed into blue-stockingism. 
The miraculous period was over, and henceforth her 
books presented the curious spectacle of artistic genius 
struggling hard, and in vain, against an ingrained 
ponderousness of mind. 

An acute thinker, a keen if somewhat ponderous 
critic, a review-writer of power and promise — such 
was George Eliot at thirty-seven, and such she might 
have remained but for the slow crystallisation of other 



148 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

forces in her nature, and the accident which revealed 
her true vocation. Contrast her with any other great 
novelist of whom we have authentic record. In most 
cases the story-telling faculty has been remarkable 
even in childhood. It was so with Jane Austen, with 
the Brontes, with Dickens, with almost any great 
novelist who can be named. Scott, indeed, does not 
begin to write novels till he is of a mature age; but 
then Scott was always a romancist, a lover of ballad 
and incident, and, as a romantic poet, had already 
prepared himself in the best possible way for the 
writing of fiction. But until George Eliot wrote 
4( Scenes from Clerical Life," she had shown neither 
love nor aptitude for fiction. She had spent her life 
in laborious scholarship, in the pursuit of the high- 
est ends of abstract thinking, in a passion for knowl- 
edge not less real, but far more intelligent, than her 
own Mr. Casaubon's. If Herbert Spencer or Darwin 
or Matthew Arnold had suddenly, at forty, become a 
novelist, it would hardly have been more astonishing. 
When her books began to be talked of, the Brays, who 
had known her most intimately, were the last to guess 
the secret of their authorship. Massive and deep they 
knew her mind to be, but these were the last qualities 
they would have dreamed of as necessary to fiction. 
Nine persons out of ten would have agreed with them ; 
and probably, of all the persons who knew George 
Eliot, there was only one who recognised her true 
bent, and was not surprised at her success. 

That one person was Mr. G. H. Lewes ; and it is 
generally admitted that it was upon his suggestion 
she attempted fiction. It says much for his prescience 
that he should have discerned the true nature of her 



GEORGE ELIOT 149 

genius so accurately. But he had opportunities of 
discernment denied to others, and knew, better than 
any other could know, the passionate sentiment which 
throbbed behind her intellectual subtlety, the fineness 
of her imagination, the fervour of her affections, the 
greatness of her heart. With the caution and precis- 
ion of a philosophic thinker she combined the inten- 
sity of a woman's nature in its essential womanliness. 
In spite of all her great range of learning, she was the 
merest woman in her surrender to the emotions. And 
she also had the clearest faculty of observation. This 
was not the mere reporter's faculty of picking up 
phrases, catching the outlines of things, rapidly seizing 
the points of a scene or a character, but something 
slower, deeper, and more enduring. It had already 
recorded indelibly all the sensations of her girlhood — 
the infinitely subtle and complex nature of its emo- 
tjons, the errors of its raw immaturity, the baffling 
variations of its temper. It allowed nothing in the 
tragedy of the soul to escape it, and little in the aspects 
of the outer life. Why not interpret all this? asked 
Mr. Lewes. Why not utilise all this profound depth 
of emotion, which drains away in waste, as well as the 
merely logical and intellectual faculties, in the pro- 
duction of books? She did so, but with timidity and 
distrust. The result was that, when she began to 
write novels, it was at once apparent that a new force 
had arisen in literature. At thirty-seven the caustic 
reviewer was suddenly changed into the ardent 
romancist ; but it was a species of romance altogether 
original in the history of fiction. It had humour, 
pathos, wit, but it had something more and something 
different. It had also a masculine grip, a complete 



150 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

and often a half-paraded mastery of the newest scien- 
tific and philosophic thought; and although no posi- 
tive effort was made to inculcate either the one or the 
other, yet in every line there was conveyed the pro- 
found conclusions of a great and serious thinker. 

How far the elaborate learning and philosophic 
training of George Eliot helped her as a novelist is 
a nice question, and capable of much argument. One 
or two conclusions, however, are obvious on a candid 
examination of her works. The chief is, that in many 
important respects she never mastered what may be 
called the craft of novel-making. There is a certain 
lumbering stiffness of movement, which is apparent in 
all her books. When she is dealing with things which 
are within her own experience, she is admirable, un- 
approachable. Nothing can excel, in general fineness 
and harmony of effect, the opening sections of " Adam 
Bede " and " The Mill on the Floss." She knew the 
countryside, and its humours, with absolute complete- 
ness. It is not, perhaps, the technical completeness of 
Thomas Hardy; but while she is quite as observant 
as Hardy in recording phrase and manner, she has a 
more spiritual insight than he in analysing the deeper 
springs of character. The Bedes, the Tullivers, the 
Gleggs, and Bob Jakin and Mrs. Poyser are living 
people; she had known them, and knew the slow rus- 
ticities in which they lived, and every tree and meadow 
of the prospects they looked upon day by day. As 
long as she moves in this atmosphere, her art is per- 
fect ; and, perhaps, the most astonishing thing about 
that art is, that without any sort of preliminary at- 
tempt she was able to produce, at the first sweep 
of her pen, scenes which cannot be improved, chapter 



GEORGE ELIOT 151 

after chapter which, in finish and completion, leaves 
nothing to be desired. 

But in all her books it is easy to draw the line 
between what is really spiritualised biography — auto- 
biography very often — and invention. She creates the 
theatre of the soul, she projects upon it immortal 
figures, she clothes them with the light of a searching 
and profound imagination. Nothing in the inner 
tragedy is missed : the very whisperings and by-play 
of the soul are accurately reported. But in the ar- 
rangement and marshalling of the outward drama — 
that is to say, in the invention of the story itself — she 
is awkward and weak. Nothing can be more com- 
monplace and banal than the reprieve scene in " Adam 
Bede." It is the sort of thing which the schoolgirl 
always puts into her first novel. Nor did ever great 
novel have more inadequate ending than " The Mill 
on the Floss." If you ask for philosophic insight, for 
the keenest analysis of spiritual emotion, for the finest 
and most sympathetic painting of country manners, 
you can have them, and in their perfection, for these 
lay well within the knowledge of George Eliot. If 
you ask for plot, you cannot have it. Of dramatic in- 
stinct she is nearly destitute. Her mind cannot un- 
bend: it has little flexibility. It has enormous powers 
of imagination, and therefore of creativeness, but no 
invention. In mere invention she is out-distanced not 
merely by many first-rate but by scores of third and 
fourth-rate novelists. 

The same defects and qualities appear even more 
conspicuously in " Romola." She has told us that she 
began it a young woman, and it left her an old one. 
What that significant confession really means is, that 



152 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

it cost her an immense effort, and that the book was 
accomplished by a sheer dead-lift. But there was no 
such draining of energy in her early books, and for a 
good reason. She wrote of her Bedes and Tullivers 
with a sort of effortless joy in her work, with the ease 
and precision of unhindered creativeness. The work is 
perfect because it is spontaneous, and because she 
knew her element and the limit of her power. But 
" Romola " was dependent almost wholly on the one 
quality she lacked — invention. It was useless to cram 
the subject: she could not weld it into coherence. We 
never once see Florence adequately as we read, nor 
have we any vivid insight into Florentine life and 
character. What we do see, and what we never for- 
get, is the subtle analysis of two complicated char- 
acters — Tito's and Romola's. Once more it is the 
spiritual tragedy that makes her book great and mem- 
orable, and it is of sufficient intensity and grandeur 
to dwarf into insignificance the outward aspects of the 
story. By the caprice of the artist the scene is laid 
in Florence, but her protagonists are of the same race 
as Maggie Tulliver and Will Ladislaw. One might 
even go further and say that the book professes to be 
about Florence, but it is really about the heart of 
George Eliot, and is another version of her own 
spiritual tragedy, with the Duomo and St. Mark's 
faintly washed in by way of background. 

The more one considers these things, the more likely 
is he to arrive at definite ideas concerning the real 
nature of George Eliot's genius, and perhaps to con- 
clude that her prime force was, after all, spiritual. It 
was by accident that she wrote novels; it was, as we 
have seen, merely the application of great powers in 



GEORGE ELIOT 153 

an unexpected direction, and, as it turned out, with 
success. But essentially she was a Methodist who had 
lost her creed, a mystic without faith, an austere and 
separated soul with an ethical mission to fulfil, but 
deflected by the complexities of her genius into an un- 
usual manner of fulfilling it. Surely, when we think 
of it, never was a person less designed for the role of 
popular novelist, and we can quite understand her 
speaking in depreciation of her books. Her real in- 
terests remained throughout her life what they were 
when she first began to write — strictly intellectual. 
The world she loved best to dwell in was the world of 
abstract thought. So far as her own character went, 
she had no humour, no keen pleasure in life, no genial- 
ity. One of her closest friends said that he had never 
once known her to make a humorous remark. She told 
another friend that she counted it a bitter injury and 
injustice to have been born. Gloom rested over her 
life — a gloom that was sometimes softened and suf- 
fused by some reflected light, but it never lifted. Her 
letters are of a deadly dulness. The impression they 
give is of a slow, massive, and powerful intellect — 
subtle and acute enough, but without elasticity. There 
is no vivacity, no genial by-play — nothing indeed of 
those qualities which have made the letters of many 
much inferior persons delightful reading. Loved she 
was by those whom she admitted to her intimacy, hon- 
oured by many more who knew the grander side of her 
character and the great range of her ability; but all 
who knew her testify to the gloom that lay upon her 
life — at times the noble gloom of the great and serious 
thinker, at others of the bitter pessimist. 

On the other hand, the very seriousness of George 



154. MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Eliot's conception of life gives an ethical value to her 
writings which is rarely found in fiction. If in early 
life we read " Adam Bede " for the mere sake of the 
poignantly pathetic story of human life which it un- 
folds, we are likely to read it many times in later life 
for the sake of the ethical message which it contains. 
Gradually we begin to see that there is not a single 
character of George Eliot's that does not stand for 
some ethical idea. The Bedes, and Mrs. Poyser, and 
Hetty Sorrel, and Maggie Tulliver, and Godfrey Cass, 
all represent an ethical idea. They stand entirely out- 
side the category of the Pickwicks and the Pumble- 
chooks. We feel that they were meant to teach some- 
thing. They preach sermons to us, and it is evident 
that their author intended them to do so. Upon the 
whole, one would be inclined to say that George Eliot's 
characters could never have taken so deep a hold on 
the mind, could never have impressed us so power- 
fully and continuously, if they had not also been so 
many ethical ideas, miraculously incarnated in flesh 
and blood, and with so subtle an art that all kinds of 
readers can appreciate them, quite apart from any eth- 
ical passion in the reader, or in spite of the entire 
absence of such a passion. 

Looked at from this point of view — and it is prob- 
ably the point of view that George Eliot herself would 
have wished us to take — how intense and enduring is 
the ethical force of her books ! Take but one aspect — 
an outstanding aspect, which no one can miss — her 
treatment of the sexual problem. Holding the opin- 
ions she did, and remembering the character of her 
own life, it would not have surprised us if she had 
taken a view of marriage which is common enough 



GEORGE ELIOT 155 

among many of the revolted women of to-day. But 
no one could write less like a revolted woman than 
George Eliot. She lays down as a first principle of 
society that there shall be no consummation of love 
without marriage, and no marriage without love. The 
finest chapter in " The Mill on the Floss " is given up 
to the elaboration of this principle. Maggie Tulliver 
nowhere reaches such a height of character as in the 
scene where she pleads with Stephen Guest, not only 
against him, but against herself. Every one will re- 
call the passage: 

" Many things [says Maggie] are difficult and dark to me ; 
but I can see one thing quite clearly — that I must not, cannot, 
seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural ; 
but purely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. 
And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey 
them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our 
love would be poisoned. Don't urge me; help me — help me, 
because I love you ! " 

The same note is struck again later on when Maggie 
has been entrapped into her elopement with Stephen. 
She pleads that her will has never consented, and that 
it is impossible she can ever consent to snatching 
happiness by the betrayal of others. The last thing 
the noble soul should seek in life is personal happiness, 
especially happiness that is bought by the misery of 
those who have trusted in us. It is by such acts as 
these that society is broken up, and the mutual faith 
that holds its units together is lost. To those who 
read between the lines there is surely in this passionate 
contention the confession of George Eliot's own soul. 
So far from urging others to do as she has done, she 
puts all the force of her conscience and genius into the 



156 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

argument against herself. There is something that is 
at once noble and pathetic in this. It has the effect of 
a personal recantation. Her ultimate conscience speaks, 
as Balaam's did, and it blesses that which, philosophi- 
cally, she might have wished to curse. 

One effect of George Eliot's spiritual apprehension 
of life is seen in her sense of its disciplinary nature. 
This is another note which she is never tired of 
striking. When she pictures Maggie Tulliver reading 
with awakened soul the yellow pages of Thomas a 
Kempis, it is that she may learn the old lesson so 
constantly reiterated by Carlyle : " Love not pleasure, 
love God : this is the everlasting Yea." The true 
dignity of man is found in his power of self-renuncia- 
tion. If he be a mere bundle of voracious appetites, 
what is he better than the beast? But the very pres- 
ence of appetites in man is the divine hint that he is 
meant to bridle and overcome them. It does not mat- 
ter what he loses in the process ; his gain is always 
more than his loss. Here George Eliot, philosophic 
pessimist as she often was, and professed antagonist 
to Christianity, comes very near the old monkish 
treatment of human nature. She has nothing to say 
on behalf of the gratification of natural appetite. Com- 
pare with her, in this respect, the impassioned plea 
for liberty of appetite in " Jane Eyre." Charlotte 
Bronte exemplified, as Mr. Russell succinctly puts it, 
genius and ignorance, just as George Eliot exempli- 
fied genius and knowledge. It is true that Charlotte 
Bronte shrank from the conclusions of her thesis, and 
vehemently repudiated them ; but the nature of the 
thesis is plain. George Eliot, with her much wider 
range of ideas and knowledge of life, takes the lofty 



GEORGE ELIOT 157 

ground that the discipline of life entails upon us first 
of all the discipline of the passions. Her heart warms 
toward a St. Theresa because she is the very type of 
suffering endured for the ideal, and she makes The- 
resa the subject of her noble proem to " Middlemarch." 
This tendency to monkish philosophy and ideals in 
George Eliot is very curious, the more so when we 
consider her antagonism to Christianity. It is quite 
conceivable that a very little would have turned her 
at. one period of her life into a good Catholic. This 
" very little " never happened, however ; but in her 
insistence on the disciplinary character of life she 
has got at the heart of the Catholic ideal, and ex- 
presses it with an austere emphasis worthy of an 
anchorite« 

The same tendency is seen, under another form, in 
her treatment of humble life. She loves to paint per- 
sons whose lot in life in insignificant, but whose spirit 
is high. Nowhere has she accomplished this with so 
much effect as in Adam Bede. Adam is the complete 
realisation of Carlyle's peasant-saint — perhaps we 
ought to say artisan-saint. In other respects also the 
conception bears the mark of Carlyle, notably in the 
dignity with which honest work is clothed. A bishop 
once said that probably Adam Bede was the nearest 
portraiture of what the human life of Christ in Naza- 
reth was like that is possible to human art — and it 
would be difficult to offer a higher compliment to 
George Eliot's genius. But the fundamental idea 
that underlies Adam Bede is found in many other of 
the personages of George Eliot's drama. Tom Tul- 
liver is another variation of the same type. She wishes 
us to see that honest work always ennobles character. 



158 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

The character of Tom is far from being a noble one, 
but it acquires a certain dignity from its patience, reso- 
luteness, and sense of duty. If Stephen Guest and 
Philip Wakem had been more strenuously engaged 
they would both have been happier men. Even Mag- 
gie, whom she loves, falls into most of her troubles 
through a certain vagueness and indolence of nature. 
Vice is the product of unoccupied minds. Virtue 
grows of itself in energetic natures. Arthur Donni- 
thorne falls into his fatal passion for Hetty Sorrel 
mainly for want of something better to do. Hetty 
Sorrel is betrayed by her vagueness of mind, which 
indulges itself in all sorts of vain and foolish dreams. 
Adam Bede stands out in contrast with both as the 
type of the healthily balanced nature, disciplined and 
strengthened by the pressure of daily work and practi- 
cal aims, which leave no room for idle reverie. 

Clear through all the drama rings one note, like the 
monotonous boom of some bell of bronze — the divine- 
ness of duty. George Eliot is never so impressive as 
when she is showing us the tragedies which spring 
from neglected duties. The sole residuum of her early 
evangelical faith was this reverence for duty. Per- 
haps it was in one way the reaction of her evangeli- 
calism. 

Having thrown away the idea of grace, of men and 
women being saved by a diviner power, and with 
scarcely any action of their own, she naturally went to 
the other extreme, and urged that the only salvation 
for man was the salvation he wrought out for himself 
in his strict adherence to the highest ethical standards 
which he knew. No one will say that this was not 
something that was worth teaching, and that needed to 



GEORGE ELIOT 159 

be taught forty years ago much more than it does now. 
It is quite possible to teach the doctrine of grace in 
such a way that it debilitates the will. There was a 
time — and George Eliot lived in that time — when such 
teaching was common. Anything that seemed to sa- 
vour of man doing anything to save himself was 
counted heretical. Mr. Froude once said that he had 
never in his life heard a sermon on the Ten Com- 
mandments or the duty of plain honesty. George 
Elidt, bred in the most orthodox evangelicalism, prob- 
ably might have said the same. When she passed out 
of evangelicalism, it was to find herself in an austere 
world, where faith counted for nothing, and duties 
for everything. She uttered this belief in every book 
she wrote. She made it her mission to impress men 
with the power that lay in themselves to make their 
lives worthy. We may supply the neglected element 
in her teaching if we will, and say that it is still true 
that works without grace are vain ; but it is also true 
that faith without works is dead, and this dogma 
George Eliot taught with all the force of her convic- 
tion, and often with most commanding eloquence. 

As a consequence of this conviction it was also 
natural that she should perpetually insist on the irrep- 
arable consequences of human error. She allows no 
way of escape for the sinner. She insists that there is 
no forgiveness of sins in nature. She does this often 
in a way that can only be regarded as pitiless. Too 
often she speaks as though men and women were 
merely the puppets of irresistible tendencies. She 
says in effect : " See, in this man there is a piece of 
diseased moral tissue. It is quite certain that it will 
grow worse, and the ulcer will spread. Medicine 



160 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

and surgery are alike useless. In three months 
he will be dead, and I will show you the process by 
which dissolution is achieved." No wonder many 
people called her a fatalist, and felt her novels to be 
unspeakably depressing. Where was that fine roman- 
tic necromancy which always contrived that all things 
should come right in the end? Where was the gen- 
ial interference on behalf of human nature, so com- 
mon among novelists, who always exercised a species 
of grace on behalf of their heroes, and manumitted 
the punishment they had richly deserved? Certainly 
not in George Eliot. If it had not been for her hu- 
mour, her vital sympathies and deep pity, the play of 
her compassion and generosity of feeling, her books 
would have been the most dismal imaginable. She 
did her best to conceal the iron logic of her reasoning 
under such feelings, and, upon the whole, she was 
so successful that the reader was enabled to forget it 
in the pure artistic pleasure which she afforded him. 
But the iron logic is there all the same. She weighs 
character to its finest grain. If she sets nought down 
in malice, she certainly extenuates nothing. She in- 
sists that as men sow so shall they reap. No divine 
power is so clear to her as the goddess called Nemesis. 
None is so awful, so unrelenting, so invariable, in her 
dealings with men. The appropriate frontispiece for 
every book she wrote w.ould be the scales and the 
sword. 

Nowhere does this moral intensity appear so clearly 
and forcibly as in the characters of Tito Melema and 
Godfrey Cass. She takes infinite pains to show us 
that Tito was not a bad man. He had a perfectly 
genuine appreciation of all that was fine and noble and 



GEORGE ELIOT 161 

high-spirited in human conduct. But he was never 
the sort of man to distress himself about being - good. 
Brought to close quarters with the austere virtue of 
Romola, he is chilled to the bone. She bids him 
breathe too rare an atmosphere, which he cannot en- 
dure. He asks for a warmer and more luxurious at- 
mosphere. He is essentially of a pleasure-loving and 
luxurious nature. He is by no means the sort of man 
to step deliberately into evil ; he is too fastidious in his 
tastes, and too anxious to keep the fair show of virtue. 
But he slides into it, and, having once begun to fall, 
falls rapidly. His first act of perfidy to his wife is the 
beginning »f a long line of perfidies. In the end he 
becomes a contemptible wretch, whose dismal doom is 
justly merited. 

In Godfrey Cass the same moral is enforced, but in 
another form. Godfrey has a happy knack of forget- 
ting that wild oats spring up. When once his miser- 
able wife seems safely dead, he forgets that she ever 
existed. He feels that he has purged his fault, and 
that upon the whole he should be pitied for all that he 
has suffered. He is ready now to live a life of perfect 
virtue, and does so. But he has yet to learn that our 
actions are like children — we may strangle them, but 
we cannot be as though they had not been. The slow- 
footed Nemesis is on his track all the time. It all 
comes home to him in the bitter moment when the 
child he had disowned through so many years now 
disowns him, and he cries : 

There's debts we can't pay like money-debts, by paying 
extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been put- 
ting off and putting off, the trees have been growing — it's too 
late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a 



162 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

man's turning away a blessing from his door ; it falls to some- 
body else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy — I shall 
pass for childless now against my wish. 

There are few pages in George Eliot's writings so 
simply pathetic as this. Without an effort she rises 
at the same time into tragic greatness. And it is in 
reading such passages as these over again, after a lapse 
of years, that we perceive how truly George Eliot was 
a teacher, and was even greater as a teacher than an 
artist. Perhaps it is this fact that truly differentiates 
her from all other novelists — a moral intensity which, 
while acting occasionally to the detriment of her art, 
at the same time invests it with an enduring dignity, 
and is the real source of all its noblest achievement. 

And one thing more may be added. Just as George 
Eliot, in spite of her own breach of social conven- 
tions, maintains these very conventions in all her writ- 
ings with an almost passionate earnestness, so, in 
spite of her renunciation of Christianity, the spirit of 
Christianity asserts itself unmistakably in her books. 
Dinah Morris preaching on the village green is one 
of the immortal pictures of literature. No page so 
pious, pathetic, and spiritual is to be found in the writ- 
ings of any novelist of the Victorian era. The fact 
was that the evangelicalism rejected by her mature 
intellect was never dislodged from her heart. She 
was an eminently spiritual woman, and no errors of 
creed or conduct had the effect of destroying this spir- 
itual element in her nature. She loved St. Theresa 
because she was conscious of intimate sympathies with 
her, and she wrote with impassioned tenderness the 
prayers put into the lips of Dinah Morris, because they 
were her own prayers, and she also was all compact 



GEORGE ELIOT 163 

of piety and divine yearning as Dinah was. A man, 
when he rejects the Christian faith, usually does so 
with thoroughness ; but in woman the faiths of the 
heart outlast the denials of the mind. Thus by a noble 
inconsistency, at once profoundly touching and strik- 
ing, George Eliot, positivist and semi-pessimist as she 
openly "declared herself to be, remained a Christian in 
heart; and in the fulness of her fame was still pretty 
much the same woman who had prayed before the 
Cross in the quiet Warwickshire village as a girl, and 
had sought with tears and penitential outpourings the 
conversion of her soul. The true George Eliot is not 
the woman who dispensed the unsatisfying bread of 
positivism to admiring disciples in St. John's Wood — 
she is Dinah Morris wrestling with God for the soul of 
Hetty Sorrel, and Maggie Tulliver thrilling in spirit 
to the devout passion of Thomas a Kempis. 

The hour has not yet come for any true life of 
George Eliot to be written; but enough is known of 
what the real nature of that life was to excite both 
reverence and pity. Few women have ever suffered 
more, or more unjustly; and if her face is sad and 
sombre, and the tone of her writings mournful, there 
is ample explanation. But one thing may be safely 
prophesied — that whatever revelations may be in store 
for the world, they will serve only to reveal the fine 
magnanimity of her character, and increase the general 
reverence for her genius. She was great alike in mind 
and nature, and her place in literature is among the 
small band of creative artists whose names are immor- 
tal, and whose supremacy is disputed only by the rival- 
ries of egoism, challenged only by the vanity of envy. 



XIII 
CHARLES READE 

Charles Readc, born at Ipsdcn, Oxfordshire, June 8th, 1811. 
Fellow of Magdalen College, 1835. Published "Peg Wofhng- 
ton," 1852; " Christie Johnstone," 1853; " Never Too Late to 
Mend," 1856; " The Cloister and the Hearth," 1861; " Hard 
Cash," 1863; " Griffith Gaunt," 1866; " Put Yourself in His 
Place," 1870. Died at Shepherd's Bush, April nth, 1884. 

THE position of Charles Reade in English fiction 
is both curious and anomalous. Fame has 
dealt grudgingly with him. The voice of criti- 
cism, which has been uproarious in praise of many- 
lesser men, has never spoken of him except in accents 
of qualification and hesitation. That he possessed rare 
and astonishing powers of intellect; that he brought 
to all the work of his pen a gigantic diligence in the 
accumulation of facts ; that he was impetuous, gener- 
ous, sensitive, lovable, pugnacious, beyond the meas- 
ure of the artistic temperament in its most striking 
instances of eccentricity ; that he exercised an in- 
fluence on the social movements of his time more di- 
rect and powerful than that of any of his contempo- 
raries in fiction, save Dickens ; that he was brilliant, 
versatile, epigrammatic, a master of melodrama, a 
writer possessing great gifts of invention and imagi- 
nation, with a power of catching the popular ear as 
remarkable as that of any writer of his time, — all this 
is admitted, and yet criticism speaks as though uncon- 
vinced of his merits. His fame continues to excite 

164 



CHARLES READE 165 

contention. His name is never uttered before the 
tribunal of the immortals without demur. 

For this strange condition of things Reade is him- 
self in part responsible. 

He regarded himself as primarily a dramatist, de- 
liberately placing on his tombstone the word " drama- 
tist " before the word " novelist." The dream of his 
life was to write a successful play ; he himself has told 
us that he devoted eighteen years to the study of dra- 
matic art, with the total result that he earned thereby 
about half a crown a week. His chief friends to 
the end of his days were actors and actresses, play- 
wrights and stage-managers, rather than men of let- 
ters. His novels were an after-thought rather than 
the deliberate choice and exercise of his genius. Thus 
his most popular book, " Never Too Late to Mend," 
is based on his drama called " Gold," and that, in 
turn, was suggested by a play which he saw in a Paris 
play-house. " Christie Johnstone " was meant to walk 
the boards before she appeared on the soberer stage 
of fiction, and " Peg Woffington " was derived from 
the once famous play " Masks and Faces," in which 
he collaborated with Tom Taylor. There can be little 
doubt that had he achieved immediate fame as a play- 
wright the world would never have heard of him as a 
novelist. The question, therefore, naturally arises 
whether a man who was so slow to recognize the scope 
of his own genius really possessed that imperative gift 
which distinguishes the creative poet and the imagi- 
native writer; for, in spite of many instances of de- 
ferred powers, such as Scott's and George Eliot's, the 
great novelist is usually sure of his vocation from the 
beginning. 



166 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Much must be allowed also for the extraordinary 
power which Reade had of exciting enmities. A man 
well born, meant for high position in the Church, a 
Vice-Chancellor of Magdalen College, tingling to his 
finger-tips with a sense of superiority, proud, pugna- 
cious, resentful of criticism, and never able to submit 
to the give and take of practical struggle, Reade was 
continually creating difficulties for himself, from which 
not even genius could wholly extricate him. He fell 
into the error of all pugnacious and sensitive men — 
he believed the world was in conspiracy against him. 
The critics are, one and all, fools and blockheads. The 
actors' world in which he moved is full of rogues and 
cheats. He is mercilessly robbed of the fruit of his 
toil, and fills the world with his outcries. When he is 
hit, he hits back without compunction. A volume 
might be filled with his controversial letters, and it 
would form one of. the most racy and humorous 
volumes in the world — also one of the most vitupera- 
tive. To one of his antagonists he writes : " Sir, you 
have ventured to contradict me on a question with 
regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you 
are as ignorant as dirt." When a certain lord coveted 
the house in which Reade resided at Albert Gate, he 
retorted by erecting a huge sign-board in front of the 
house, bearing the legend " Naboth's Vineyard." It 
would have been contrary to the course of nature if a 
man of so swift and impetuous a temper had not made 
enemies, but Reade never imagined that the fault was 
with himself even in the most minor degree. The 
best that can be said on these matters is that Reade 
was generally right in his contentions, but right or 
wrong he loved contention, one suspects, for its own 



CHARLES READE 167 

sake. He was a born fighter, and his fight was usually 
against conventions. The man who spends his days 
in combat with blockheads must necessarily incur mis- 
apprehensions that render the sober appreciation of 
his genius among his contemporaries a matter of ex- 
treme difficulty. 

There is another side of the question which impinges 
on the realm of art. The art of the dramatist, as we 
have seen, differs fundamentally from the art of the 
novelist. The dramatist works upon a canvas where 
every stroke must tell. He must secure an immediate 
effect. He must over-emphasise the characters in or- 
der to secure this effect. The novelist, on the contrary, 
works out the development of his characters by slow 
and delicate processes. We do not comprehend the 
egoism of Sir Willoughby Pattern, or the deliberate 
selfishness of Tito Melema, until we are half-way 
through their histories. The novelist shows us charac- 
ter in its growth, while the dramatist deals with it in 
its completion. The novelist is seldom a good play- 
wright, and the playwright is yet more infrequently a 
good novelist. Reade sought to combine both arts, 
making the dramatist's art the base from which he at- 
tempted the work of the novelist. The result is that 
his books lack repose. His characters are always 
over-emphasised. He must create for them striking 
and dramatic situations, sometimes in defiance of the 
probabilities of the story. His novels bear the trace 
of their origin ; they are expanded dramas. He works 
too palpably towards a crisis ; he is always ringing the 
curtain down upon a tableau. His over-emphasis is 
seen in the very construction and printing of his books. 
When he has something striking to say he uses capital 



168 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

letters, to the irritation of his readers. It is a trick 
akin to the grimace or gesticulation of the actor, who 
trusts to physical rather than intellectual means to im- 
press his message on his audience. Had Reade from 
the first been a novelist, and a novelist only, he had 
been a much greater novelist. What he could do, 
when he was distracted by no memories of the stage, 
and had thrown off stage methods of construction, he 
has shown us in his " Cloister and the Hearth," which 
is not merely his greatest book, but one of the greatest 
books in English literature. Of the rest of his books 
it may be said that while they have superb character- 
istics of energy and invention, they all suffer more or 
less from those features which count for virtues in a 
drama, but vices in a novel. 

In searching for stage effects, Reade often puts the 
natural effect of his fine literary art in jeopardy. He 
is so anxious about the climax that he discounts it 
by forestalling it. He allows us to see too clearly the 
dramatic point at which he is aiming, and we are 
cheated of the effect of surprise, which in poetry and 
fiction is the most delightful of all effects. An ex- 
ample of this weakness is found in the truly magnifi- 
cent episode of the wanderings of Fielding and Robin- 
son in the Australian bush, in " Never Too Late to 
Mend." They are being hunted by murderers ; they 
come upon their own tracks, and find they are moving 
in a circle ; they find at the same time that other foot- 
steps mingle with their own trail. This latter dis- 
covery changes the whole situation. The murderers 
are now ahead of them instead of behind them. " What 
are you doing ? " asks Robinson, when Fielding starts 
afresh upon the trail. " I am hunting the hunters," 



CHARLES READE 169 

he replies. An admirable and thrilling situation, but 
when Reade prints the sentence in capital letters he 
spoils a great effect. " Those capital letters," says Mr. 
Christie Murray, " have long since called the attention 
of the reader to themselves, and the point the writer 
tries to emphasise is doubly lost. It has been fore- 
stalled, and has become an irritation. You come on 
it twice ; you have been robbed of anticipation and sus- 
pense, which, just here, are the life and soul of art. 
You know before you ought to be allowed to guess; 
and, worst of all, perhaps, you feel that your intelli- 
gence has been affronted. Surely you had imagina- 
tion enough to feel the significance of the line with- 
out this meretricious trick to aid you." Any one can 
see that the tradition of the stage is responsible for 
this device. It is closely akin to the stage " aside," 
the hint of the dramatist, which is meant to express 
a meaning which he dares not entrust wholly to the 
actor. On the stage it is necessary, simply because 
it is difficult to make the story clear without it. But 
in a novel it is not necessary, because the story should 
explain itself. 

On the other hand, Reade's long apprenticeship to 
dramatic art taught him many things which are in- 
valuable in fiction. He has the keenest eye for situa- 
tion. He gets to his point at once. His dialogue is 
terse, brisk, epigrammatic, and is sharpened into con- 
stant brilliance. The student, when he turns novelist, 
is apt to pack his narrative with pedantries, philoso- 
phies, and meditations, which would be admirable in 
an essay, but only retard the movement of a story. 
Many pages might be deleted from Scott and Thacke- 
ray and George Eliot without the slightest injury to 



170 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the story — rather, indeed, to its advantage. We could 
ill spare these passages, it is true — we who find in them 
the most intimate revelation of the author's mind ; but 
the story could spare them. They divert attention 
from the main issues of the drama, and while we are 
engaged in reflection the characters in the drama be- 
come a trifle dimmed and indistinct. To put it plainly, 
neither Scott nor Thackeray nor George Eliot shows 
more than a rudimentary knowledge of how a novel 
should be constructed. But it is in the art of con- 
struction that Reade excels. He hurries us breath- 
lessly from scene to scene. If he is too fond of ar- 
ranging striking tableaux, it must at least be admitted 
that the tableaux are striking. His stories are full of 
movement ; they have not a dull moment, nor a 
moment when his invention flags. To achieve such 
effects no doubt something is sacrificed. His charac- 
ters are usually very white or very black ; he has no 
time to mix the more elusive colours on his palate. 
His drama often has something of that crude element 
which we call transpontine ; his hero must be ap- 
plauded, and his villain hissed from first to last, and 
after his great scenes we are conscious that he ex- 
pects the afrirmatory uproar of the theatre. Neverthe- 
less, dramatic power in fiction is too rare to be lightly 
despised, even though it lean to transpontine forms of 
art. It is a great achievement to enthrall the reader, 
to make him burn and thrill, to excite his pity, anger, 
terror, praise, and hatred in scene after scene through 
a long book ; and this Reade does, and for the power to 
do it he was debtor to the stage. 

Of Reade more than of any other great novelist it 
may be said that his method is episodical. We do not 



CHARLES READE 171 

remember his books by their total effect so much as 
by a series of brilliant episodes. The hunted hunting 
the hunters ; the finding of the huge nugget of gold 
by Jacky;'the captive lark singing its few faint notes 
to the crowd of home-sick miners ; Griffith Gaunt 
standing in the snow ; the two German printers with 
their clumsy printing-machines by the wayside on the 
road to Italy, — these and a score of similar episodes 
only have to be named to be instantly recalled by even 
the casual reader. They have the kind of distinctness 
and the haunting power which we usually associate 
with great works of pictorial art. We remember them 
in the same way that we remember a piece of painted 
drama like Lady Butler's " Roll-call," or the " Survi- 
vor of an Army." And they touch the emotions in 
much the same way and by the same means. They are 
summaries of something elemental in human nature, — 
fear, greed, home-sickness, adventure, loneliness, emo- 
tions known to all men, whatever their condition. A 
novel which hurries us from episode to episode may 
not be the greatest form of novel, but a novel which 
contains episodes so thrilling, and so catholic in their 
appeal, that they become indelible in the memory, 
have the kind of greatness which none but a pedantic 
critic will despise. 

Fundamentally Reade was a realist, although his 
romantic and dramatic instincts play constant havoc 
with his realism. He studied life at first-hand; he 
had Zola's passion for " human documents " ; he 
grudged no labour to get at facts. " That book," he 
said of " Never Too Late to Mend," " took four years, 
morning, noon, and night, out of my life. I wrote here, 
there, everywhere — in town, at Oxford — laying down a 



172 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

definite plan, from which I never departed ; always 
determined to leave nothing to accident, nothing to 
guess-work." The labour which he undertook in the 
preparation of a book, drudging, tedious, unweariable 
labour in the accumulation of materials, was prodig- 
ious. Blue-books, statistics, reports, histories, maga- 
zines, journals, and police-court news were diligently 
read, sifted, preserved, and indexed so methodically 
that he knew where to find what he wanted at a mo- 
ment's notice. There was excuse for his boast that 
he was " profoundly learned " on the subjects he wrote 
about, for he never wrote on any subject till he had 
mastered all that was to be known about it. Sir Ed- 
win Arnold speaks with wonder of the " enormous 
note-books which he compiled, in the course of his 
various publications, with their elaborate system of 
reference and confirmation, and their almost encyclo- 
paedic variety and range " ; and he says truly that these 
note-books should rank as " among the greatest curi- 
osities of literature, and be a perennial monument of 
his artistic fidelity." Reade went much further than 
the compilation of note-books ; he sought where it was 
possible to share the experiences he depicts. He him- 
self had been shut up in the dark cell of a prison before 
he describes the torture of the unhappy Robinson. 
Robinson himself was a prisoner whom he met in Dur- 
ham Gaol, and the merciful warder he describes died 
the other day in Birmingham. Reade knew perfectly 
well that on the controversial themes of which he wrote 
nothing told like the sheer weight of fact, and it is 
little wonder that he excited both consternation and 
hatred in antagonists who were not armed with his 
encyclopaedic knowledge. Yet, with all his strong 



CHARLES READE 173 

bent towards realism, he escaped the chief peril of real- 
ism — the lack of sane perspective — by virtue of his in- 
tellectual breadth. He saw the evil he exposed with 
an intense vividness, but he saw it in real relation to 
good. His was not the realism of Zola, which Steven- 
son describes as " romance with the small-pox ; dis- 
eased anyway, and blackhearted, and fundamentally at 
enmity with joy"; it was rather a Biblical kind of 
realism, which uses very plain and strong words with 
prophetic force, but still retains the prophetic vision of 
the working out of good in the general scheme of 
things. 

The distinction is worth noting, because it will assist 
us to clearness of thought in considering other forms 
of fiction beside Reade's. Realism is never offensive 
except when it is allied with radical lack of faith in 
human nature. We may thread the darkest labyrinths 
of these Infernos where men suffer abominably and un- 
justly, and take no harm with this clue in our hands; 
but without faith in human nature man loses his own 
soul in laying bare the ulcer of his brother's soul. The 
offence of Zola's art lies, after all, not so much in its 
material as in its spirit. A prison is one thing to 
Reade, and quite another thing to Zola, although the 
facts which each beholds are the same, because the 
spiritual attitude of each is so widely different. It is 
well to know the worst, but we should believe the best 
even while we know the worst, if our knowledge is not 
to dismay us and corrupt us. It is in this respect that 
Reade's realism is sanative and wholesome ; he does 
not abuse his vision by confining it only to dark and 
painful things. There is a consciousness of the " ulti- 
mate decency of things," and a corresponding buoy- 



174 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

ancy of spirit in all his writings, which indicates the 
masculine temperament in realism, as opposed to the 
feminine and the hysteric. 

It should be remembered also that Reade's realism 
was always directed to practical ends of social refor- 
mation. He not merely laid his finger on the diseased 
tissue in the body politic, and said, " Thou ailest here, 
and here," but he declared a remedy. 

In 1853 the prison system of England was a system 
of torture carried out on professedly humanitarian 
principles. One authenticated case, among many re- 
vealed by the Royal Commission which sat in that year, 
was of a boy named Andrews, fifteen years of age, 
sentenced to three months' imprisonment with hard 
labour for petty larceny. This boy was put upon the 
treadmill, and, being unable to perform his task, was, 
by the governor's orders, put on bread-and-water diet, 
deprived of bed and light, and finally condemned to 
a strait-waistcoat and strapped to the wall. Three days 
later he committed suicide by hanging himself in his 
cell. It was the ferocious stupidity of the treatment 
that excited Reade's indignation. He saw, what many 
have seen since, that the English prison system manu- 
factures rather than reforms criminals. Treat a man 
as a savage beast and you make him one. Put him to 
useless labour and you destroy his manhood. The first 
aim of the prison authorities should be not to punish 
but to reform the unhappy creatures over whom they 
have absolute power. Reade took up his parable with 
an eloquence, a force of conviction, a lofty passion of 
indignation, which stirred the public as no bare state- 
ment of fact could have done. He did more — he 
created vital drama from the gross material of blue- 



CHARLES READE 175 

books. Although there is no concealment for an in- 
stant of the purpose with which he wrote, yet that pur- 
pose was always subordinate to art. In his hands fic- 
tion becomes a vital force in the formation of public 
opinion, and yet so justly tempered is his narrative that 
it never ceases to be a work of literary art. To unite 
the functions of the propagandist of ideas with those of 
the artist is always a task of extreme difficulty; but 
where many failed Reade achieved a triumphant suc- 
cess, and his success lies in the fact that he had the 
true creative instinct, the touch of flame, which welds 
a mass of fact into dramatic forms. 

It must be counted to Reade for righteousness that 
he thus used his great powers for public ends. There 
is, however, one of his books, " The Cloister and the 
Hearth," in which he writes as an artist only, and it 
is his greatest book. A distinct purpose in a novel 
must always have one drawback — it limits the stage. 
Be the writer never so fine an artist he must obey the 
limits of his theme, he must stick to his text, and he 
must check those excursions of his imagination which 
divert his own mind and the attention of his readers 
from the cause he pleads. When Reade came to write 
" The Cloister and the Hearth," he was free from 
these limitations. His stage was nothing less than 
the entire Middle Ages. He was free to wander where 
he would, to survey men and cities, to employ all the 
resources of a vast erudition, to gratify his taste for 
art, to re-create the life and manners of one of the 
most fascinating periods of universal history. Every 
novelist should have the boldness to write one book to 
please himself rather than his public. It is his con- 
solation for years of drudgery. Reade claimed his 



176 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

right, but with the usual result as regards the public. 
The book received no welcome, and came near to per- 
ishing at its birth. It appeared as a serial in " Once 
a Week," but was so mercilessly tampered with by the 
editor of that journal that Reade abruptly closed the 
story. Reade never forgave the editor ; and when that 
unfortunate man was subsequently confined in a luna- 
tic asylum, he caustically remarked that little else could 
be expected from a fellow who tampered with his 
" copy." The cause of the public indifference to the 
story was not far to seek. Novelists, like painters and 
poets, have to obey the tradition of their earliest suc- 
cesses. The man who paints a pig better than anything 
else must go on painting pigs all his life, if he means 
to live by his art; and similarly the novelist who has 
gained his success by realism indulges in romance at 
his peril. Reade was quite aware of this. He said 
rather bitterly that " the public don't care about the 
dead. A baby found strangled in a bonnet-box at 
Piccadilly Circus interests them much more than Mar- 
garet's piety or Gerard's journey to Rome." Yet 
fortune has declared in favour of the book which the 
public neglected and Reade almost regretted writing 
in his hour of disappointment. Fifty years ago it may 
have been true, as Reade said, that for one reader 
who read " The Cloister and the Hearth " a thousand 
had read " Never Too Late to Mend " ; but it is no 
longer true. The story which offended the editor of 
" Once a Week," and injured the circulation of that 
estimable journal, has become a classic. The stone 
which the builders rejected has become the corner- 
stone in the edifice of Reade's fame. 

It is a truly marvellous book. It is full of knowl- 



CHARLES READE 177 

edge of all sorts, derived not only from immediate re- 
searches in the Bodleian, but from years of meditation. 
It is full of wisdom, too, the ripe wisdom of a thinker 
who has something authoritative to say on the nature 
of human life. In mere picturesqueness, in the staging 
of great and brilliant scenes, in the constant thrill of 
romance, it is unrivalled. Who does not recall some of 
these scenes — the humble burgher life at Tergou, the 
ducal feast at Rotterdam, the flight of Gerard, the 
fight in the woods, the crossing of the Rhine, the 
burning of the mill — these, and a score of other epi- 
sodes, painted with a masterly vivacity and extraordi- 
nary imaginative power? The life of inns, taverns, 
wayside hostelries ; of cloisters, palaces, and seats of 
learning ; the gross poverty of the poor, and the equally 
gross splendour of the rich ; the life of the road, full 
of peril and adventure ; the total absence of security 
and justice in the social conditions ; and through all the 
rapid scenes the sense of something new stirring, the 
slow upheaval of thought, the birth-throe of new in- 
tellectual life and a new age, — all this is conveyed to 
the reader with inimitable spirit, with the vivid skill of 
the impressionist who creates pictures in a phrase, 
united with the solid erudition of the scholar. Truly 
great figures emerge too ; not only Gerard and Mar- 
garet, but Fra Colonna and the Pope ; Perugino in his 
bare lodging in Rome, and Margaret Van Eyck, guard- 
ing jealously the secrets of her art. And with this 
creative art in episodes and figures there goes some- 
thing rarer — a reproduction of the exact atmosphere 
of the period. We are able to think the thoughts of 
the Middle Ages as well as see their life. The book is 
vast in scope as well as exact in detail. It is in this 



178 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

respect that it is most remarkable ; for no other artist, 
not even Scott, has worked on so daring a scale. Other 
artists have succeeded admirably in painting a period, 
and making a group of figures representative of the 
period, but Reade paints the Middle Ages themselves, 
and to follow his narrative is, as Sir Conan Doyle ob- 
serves, " like going through the Middle Ages with a 
dark lantern." And yet even this striking saying ex- 
presses but part of the matter ; for if there is the vivid- 
ness of a shaft of light plunging into dark places in 
the episodes of the book, there is also a lucid clearness 
in the whole, as of dawn — a broad landscape, over 
which is spread an equal light. 

The fame of Reade will more and more come to rest 
upon " The Cloister and the Hearth." It gives the true 
measure of his powers, and it ranks as one among the 
very few immortal books in modern fiction. With such 
an achievement the most ambitious genius may be 
content. There is but one regret when we close the 
book ; it is that its author should have been so ignorant 
of the real character of his genius, that he should have 
devoted half his life to dramas which are forgotten, 
when he might have produced works of literature 
which would have ranked him with the great masters. 
But if, as he himself said, " he flowered late," he 
flowered in rare fashion, for the greatest writer might 
be proud to own Reade's greatest work. 



XIV 
CHARLES KINGSLEY 

Charles Kingsley was born at Holne Vicarage, Dartmoor, 
June I2th, 1819. Published " The Saint's Tragedy," 1848; 
"Alton Locke," and " Yeast," 1849; " Hypatia," 1853; " West- 
ward Ho" 1855; " Tivo Years Ago" 1857; " Hercward the 
Wake," 1866. Appointed a Canon of Westminster and Chap- 
lain to the Queen, 1873. Died at Evcrslcy, January 23rd, 1875. 
His collected zvorks fill twenty-eight volumes. 

CHARLES KINGSLEY shares with Charles 
Reade a high place in the secondary order of 
novelists. Fundamentally Reade was the 
broader and greater man, and his one great novel, 
" The Cloister and the Hearth," gives him classic rank. 
Kingsley has produced nothing of the same weight, 
distinction, and brilliance. It is possible that Reade, 
upon the strength of his one masterpiece, may be re- 
membered with the great masters, in much the same 
way that Blackmore will be remembered by his " Lorna 
Doone." Kingsley, however, has written nothing that 
suggests a doubt as to his ultimate place in fiction. 
" Westward Ho " is not comparable with " The Cloister 
and the Hearth " or with " Lorna Doone." " Hy- 
patia " is upon the whole a brilliant failure. Yet it can- 
not be doubted that Kingsley has exerted an influence 
upon his age attained by neither of these novelists. It 
is an influence subtle and peculiar, based in part on 
personality, in part on the nature of his message — an 

179 



180 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

influence more commonly associated with the prophet 
than the novelist. 

The nature of the times in which Kingsley wrote, as 
well as the nature of the man, had much to do with 
this influence, which seems to a reader of the twentieth 
century out of all proportion to his genius. He was 
the product of circumstances, the interpreter of ten- 
dencies, the voice of a movement. The years during 
which Kingsley 's best work was done were years of 
great perturbation of thought in England. The entire 
social system had become the subject of alarm and 
debate. There was a general uneasiness of feeling — 
a conviction on the part of some, and a strong sus- 
picion on the part of many, that all was not well with 
the land. There was much bitter and excited debate on 
social conditions — little careful diagnosis, but the loud 
proclamation of many vague and violent remedies — a 
sense of impending change, exciting in equal degrees 
hope and fear. There was a general consciousness that 
the old landmarks were shifting or had shifted. Men 
were feeling their way to new ideals and dreaming of 
new combinations. It looked as though all that was 
traditional in faith and thought, together with all that 
was old in social convention, would be cast into the 
melting-pot, to emerge in what form God only knew. 
Kingsley interpreted this uneasiness, though he did 
little to allay it. He became the intermediary of greater 
minds than his own. He gave currency to the re- 
ligious views of Maurice and the social gospel of Car- 
lyle. He lifted up his voice in noble anger, and took 
possession of the platform of fiction as a prophet of 
righteousness. His books were impassioned declara- 
tions of faith and principle. At this distance of time 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 181 

it is difficult to discriminate how much of his fame 
belonged to the prophet, how much to the artist ; but 
it is certain that his prophetic fervour gave him a 
strong influence over many minds not usually sensitive 
to the appeal of art. 

The highest kind of artistic genius combines intense 
energy with calm equipoise ; it works, as Goethe so 
finely said, " without haste and without rest." Judged 
by such a canon, Kingsley did not possess the highest 
kind of genius. His books were wrung out of him by 
an effort that told severely on his physical health. He 
is apt to become hysterical through excess of feeling. 
He often resembles the orator who strains his voice in 
order to secure attention, shouting a statement which 
would have been infinitely more effective if uttered 
with quiet and deliberate emphasis. He never attains 
the great artist's sane and gracious vision of the pro- 
portion of things. It may be said of him, as it was said 
of the author of "Obermann " : 

A fever in these pages burns, 

A wounded human spirit turns 
Here, on its bed of pain. 

His physical restlessness was one of the character- 
istics much commented upon by his friends. There is 
the same overwrought vivacity in all his books. It is 
very impressive at times. It excites our wonder, it 
communicates its contagion, it expresses itself in bursts 
of eloquence that carry us away with a rush, but after 
a time it wearies us. We feel much as a man might 
feel in the company of a too declamatory friend, who 
never has a " flash of silence." If he would but sit 



182 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

down and talk quietly, if he would but lay aside now 
and then the prophet's mantle, if he would but recollect 
that it is against nature that a man should be always 
on the tribune ; but no, even in the closest privacy he 
will still address us " as though we were a public meet- 
ing." In books, as in friendship, repose is the secret 
of enduring charm. In Kingsley's books the element 
of repose is altogether wanting. 

The nature of Kingsley's gift may be fairly, though 
not quite adequately, measured by one of his earliest 
books, " Yeast." It has serious faults, both of con- 
struction and characterisation. Yet it both holds and 
stirs the reader by its manifest sincerity and earnest- 
ness. Lancelot Smith is a good deal of a prig, and it 
is a little difficult to believe in Tregarva. Here Kings- 
ley is idealising, and here he is at his worst and weak- 
est. But the moment Kingsley comes to deal with 
scenes and things he knows, with the hunting-field, 
with the trout-stream, with the life of squires, farmers, 
game-keepers, and poachers, he writes with infinite 
vivacity and charm. If his Lancelot Smith is not con- 
vincing, Crawy (the poacher) and Harry Verney (the 
keeper) are vital figures. He has rendered them to 
the life, — the misplaced ingenuities, the shifty courage, 
the thwarted manhood of the poacher, born disin- 
herited, and crushed out of shape by ages of social 
tyranny ; the faithfulness and honest pride of the 
keeper, whose last words, as he lies shot, are, " There 
ain't such a head of hares on any manor of the county, 
and them's the last words of Harry Verney ! " In 
this, as in all his books, Kingsley is strongest when he 
is at close quarters with the common people. His art 
goes upon lame feet until his sympathies are kindled 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 183 

by contact with the poor and disinherited. His picture 
of the village feast, with the dull bestiality, its dim-eyed 
sodden boors, touched with no warmth of true merri- 
ment, with their muddy romance, their spiritless pleas- 
ures, their brooding sense of injury, is vivid and start- 
ling and indelibly true. It is the thrilling note of hu- 
manitarianism that dominates this and all the most 
impressive scenes in the book. 

" Alton Locke " is a novel conceived in the same 
vein, but with a greatly widened range of power. His 
faculty of characterisation has ripened ; it is alto- 
gether more accurate and skilful. The book contains 
one figure wholly admirable — old Mackaye, of whom 
Carlyle said, " my invaluable countryman in this book 
is nearly perfect. . . . His very dialect is as if a 
native had done it; the whole existence of the rugged 
old hero is a wonderfully splendid and coherent piece 
of Scotch bravura." The questions discussed in this 
volume go to the very root of the social problem. He 
has looked on London with the same penetrating and 
sympathetic eye which had already discovered the mis- 
eries and maladies of the rural population. He writes 
now in a sustained frenzy of passion and indignation, 
exposing the evils of his time with a ruthless realism 
which is profoundly impressive.. ''Alton Locke" is 
his best book, because it is the book most representative 
of the man. It shows us Kingsley at his noblest, and it is 
besides a memorial of a movement very remarkable in 
itself, and still of unexhausted potency in its influence 
on society. 

The book is not only his best book, but so much 
remains unaltered in social conditions that it may still 
be regarded as a book with a message. Nevertheless, 



184 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

it must be allowed that Kingsley contributes nothing 
very positive to the solution of the problem he presents 
with so much vigour. He exhibits the common weak- 
ness of prophets — of Carlyle, for example — that he 
finds the denunciation of evil much easier than the 
discovery of a remedy. Prophets rarely have the gift 
of constructive statesmanship, and Kingsley is no ex- 
ception to the rule. Another thing worth notice is that 
Kingsley's radicalism is a kind of aristocratic radical- 
ism. His sympathies are with the people, but he is 
scarcely a democrat. He is a Socialist, but with such 
curious reserves that it is doubtful if the flannel-col- 
lared Socialist of to-day would have owned him. He 
had a good deal more sympathy with a well-ordered 
feudalism than with genuine Chartism. His temper 
was mainly the Tory-democrat temper; his hope of 
national salvation lay in the squires rather than the 
people. 

In " Alton Locke " his bitterest satire is directed, not 
against the classes, but the demagogic leaders of the 
masses. One or two things he saw clearly and truly ; 
and the chief was that the rift between the classes was 
spreading. He had very vague ideas of how it was to 
be healed. In his later prefaces to " Two Years Ago " 
he seems to imagine that the Crimean War, which 
every statesman of note to-day does not hesitate to 
denounce as a stupendous blunder, was to be the means 
of a new reconciliation of society. Such a declaration 
makes us suspect that Kingsley never really grasped 
the social problem with any approach to accuracy. 
His sympathies were true enough, but his was not the 
order of mind that patiently investigates facts and 
discovers remedies. One could wish that it had been 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 185 

otherwise, though such wishes are futile. But Kings- 
ley did one thing with splendid efficiency: he pic- 
tured the conditions of the problem with such intense 
vividness and sympathy that he did much — perhaps 
more than any other man of his time — to rouse the 
mass of men to its consideration. Other writers may 
suggest the remedies ; it is, after all, no small service 
to get the facts stated in such a way that they lay 
hold of the popular imagination, and melt the frost of 
callousness which has kept the sympathies of a nation 
stagnant. 

The moral earnestness of Kingsley was his most 
distinctive quality, but that alone would scarcely have 
made him a popular novelist. Fortunately for his fame 
he possessed also an eye of extraordinary quickness 
for natural beauty, a thoroughly masculine tempera- 
ment capable of appreciating the joys of mere living, 
and a very noble sense of chivalry. Nothing that he 
saw of sadness and disorder in the world around him 
could prevent him from praising God for life. He has 
the art of writing about gloomy things without writing 
gloomily. He never loses sight of blue sky and the 
secure stars. His joy in life is absolute, and almost 
boisterous. Hence there is a wholesome, gladdening, 
uplifting power in all his 'writings. He is never so 
charming as when he touches with a vivid brush the 
things of Nature — never so animated as when he paints 
the pleasures of a strenuous life — never so inspiring 
as when he speaks of woman and sings like a trouba- 
dour the praise of chivalry. 

Kingsley 's passion for Nature was a kind of in- 
toxication. It is not the calm, sustained Nature-wor- 
ship of Wordsworth; it is a feverish ecstasy, yet it is 



186 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

equally virile and authentic. Fine scenery inebriates 
him. The best passages in his novels are those in 
which he describes with the eye of a naturalist and the 
zest of a boy some aspect of sea or land, forest or open 
heath, which has impressed him. In his " Prose Idylls " 
— a book which never enjoyed the popularity it de- 
served — there are some exquisite pieces of Nature- 
rendering, which once read are not easily forgotten. 
The same faculty is found in his poetry; indeed, it is 
difficult to imagine a poet who is not a lover of Nature. 
But it will be noticed that Kingsley's passion for Na- 
ture is not merely not Wordsworth's, but it is totally 
unlike it. It is the feeling, not of the mystic, but of 
the Indian hunter — a frank sense of being akin to the 
earth, of delight in her magnificence, of keen-edged 
sensations produced by contact with her. There was 
a certain animal vigour in all Kingsley's sensations. 
He speaks of himself as tempted to a hunter's life on 
the prairies ; and it is easy to see that it is the ocean-like 
vastness and freedom of the prairie which has fas- 
cinated his imagination. He did not easily accommo- 
date himself to the trammels of civilisation. He felt 
in himself a need for boundlessness — a thirst for the 
desolate and barbaric places of the earth. And in its 
way this was a message worth delivering. It is prob- 
able that it has been a powerful factor in the expansion 
of England. Many a youth, reading Kingsley's fas- 
cinating descriptions of wild Nature, has been fired 
with a desire for emigration. If nothing else has hap- 
pened, he has felt that cities are a poor substitute for 
Nature, and has sought some better acquaintance with 
the green country lying at his door. And, in an age 
like ours, it is obviously a great thing to make men 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 187 

feel that Nature has claims upon them, and *that no 
man can be said to fulfil his own best instincts who 
knows only the sooty pavements of the city. 

It was natural enough that a man who felt these 
things as keenly as Kingsley did should have had some- 
thing to say upon field sports. And by another natural 
transition we see how easy it was for him to reach 
his conception of the " Muscular Christian." It mat- 
ters very little to us that Kingsley protested against 
this term, and considered it an opprobrious nickname 
invented by his enemies ; most of us will see nothing 
in it to excite indignation, and, as nicknames go, it is 
both just and felicitous. For what does it amount to? 
Simply this, that Kingsley saw around him numerous 
specimens of a flabby, nerveless, flaccid Christianity 
which he utterly despised. Such people virtually, 
though not by professed creed, held the body in con- 
tempt. They were all intent on saving the soul — 
" their dirty little souls," as Kingsley scornfully said. 
They had no interest in any sort of games — games were 
a sinful waste of time. They were infected by the old 
Puritan prejudice against sport of all kinds. As for 
vivid delight in Nature, they did not know what it 
meant ; and if they did, would have characterised it as 
a sinful worship of the creature instead of the Creator. 
Was that the sort of religion that England wanted? 
Kingsley asked. Was that the sort of religion which 
made nations great? Was it any merit, or any proof 
of superior spirituality in a youth, that his muscles 
were flabby, that he did not know how to use his fists 
on occasion, that he spent his time in meditation on his 
own soul and its future prospects, when a world full 
of innocent means of enjoyment lay round about him? 



188 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Kingsley answered in his impassioned way that such 
a youth was a fool and a prig. He professed himself 
the " chaplain of Esau," the wild man and the hunter : 
Jacob, who cheated his way to a fortune, had plenty 
of apologists. He elevated into new dignity the athlete, 
the man of fine animal vigour and physical courage. 
And he endeavoured to show that a man could be both 
an athlete and a Christian — that he might be brave, 
heroic, hardened into physical endurance, soldierly, 
skilled in sport, but none the less a Christian, who 
feared God, reverenced duty, and lived chastely. 

Religion was with him the cultivation and sanctifica- 
tion of the whole man. The most deadly of all heresies 
was contempt of the body, and development of the soul 
at the price of the body. The soul developed by such 
a process, he would have said, was not worth any- 
body's saving. We may not need to be told these 
things to-day, when athleticism has triumphed all along 
the line ; perhaps the time has come when it is neces- 
sary to insist on the other side of the truth, and tell 
men that sanitation is not salvation, and that the life 
is more than meat, the soul more than the body. But 
in Kingsley 's day the message was needed, and he 
drove it home with a cogency and fervour worthy of 
an apostle. After all, Kingsley's " Muscular Chris- 
tian " is a very admirable conception, and one of 
which neither he nor we have any reason to be ashamed. 

If " Alton Locke " was Kingsley's best book, as 
being most representative of the spirit of the man, 
" Westward Ho ! " is his greatest book, as being the 
most representative of his powers as a novelist. It 
has many of the characteristics of a great book — a 
large canvas, a stirring theme, a noble story told with 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 189 

immense spirit and vivacity, and full of passages that 
come near to epic dignity. Here he works at the full 
measure of his power, with complete zest and freedom. 
Amyas Leigh is an authentic piece of manhood. We 
can believe in him, which is not always the case with 
Kingsley's heroes. We can believe in his adventures, 
and we follow them with breathless interest. And we 
believe also in the general picture of the times which 
Kingsley draws. The case may not be altogether as 
Kingsley states it. His pretension to historic accuracy 
has been constantly attacked ; but he is as accurate as 
Scott, who regarded history as a treasure for the 
plunderer, who naturally takes what he wants, and 
rejects what is useless to him. Granted the principle, 
we are only concerned with the result ; for no sensible 
reader expects sound history in fiction, though he may 
unwittingly swallow a great deal of fiction in history. 
Kingsley achieves this great result ; he re-creates in 
his own vivid fashion the England of Elizabeth. He 
interprets to us the spirit and fashion, the romance 
and adventure, the faith and courage, the heroism, 
chivalry, and rising patriotism of those great and spa- 
cious times. " Westward Ho ! " is a book which has 
so much of greatness that, had Kingsley died at thirty- 
five, says Mr. Leslie Stephen, " we should have specu- 
lated upon the great things which we had lost." It is 
upon this book that his reputation chiefly rests, and 
by it his rank as a novelist must be determined. 

If Kingsley fails of the highest rank among modern 
novelists, the reason lies in his versatility. He at- 
tempted too many things to do them all equally well, or 
even to do one with entire perfection. It is not given 
to the greatest man to unite in himself the functions 



190 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of the parish clergyman, the social reformer, the con- 
troversialist, the historian, the preacher, the poet, and 
the novelist, without some sacrifice of one power in the 
service of another, and that general diminution of 
efficiency which is the result of power applied to too 
wide an area. What is gained in superficies is lost at 
the centre. Kingsley, in his energetic passion to lead 
a full life, did not perceive this truth. Possibly we are 
the gainers by his ignorance. We could ill spare his 
poetry for the sake of his novels, and many of us 
would be inclined to say that such gems of lyrical ex- 
pression as " Oh, that we two were maying," " The 
Three Fishers," and " Loraine Lorree," with their poig- 
nant, penetrating pathos, strike a rarer note of genius 
than anything in his more ambitious prose. Still less 
could we spare the noble example of a life not only 
lived at highest pressure, but consistently lived for 
great things. Kingsley, in being less than a great nov- 
elist, is also more — he is a teacher of singular force, 
who through many forms of activity communicated 
many impulses to his race, all of which make for loftier 
ideals of life, for enlarged humanitarian sympathies, 
and for that spirit of heroism and duty without which 
nations miss the hour of their visitation and perish 
from the earth. 



XV* 
GEORGE MEREDITH 

George Meredith, bom in Hampshire, February 12th, 1828. 
Published "Poems," 1851; "The Shaving of Shagpat," 1855; 
" The Ordeal of Richard Fevercl," 1859; " Evan Harrington," 
1861; "Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside," 
1862; "Sandra Balloni," 1864; " Rhoda Fleming," 1865; " Vit- 
toria," 1866; "Adventures of Harry Richmond," 1871; "Beau- 
champ's Career," 1875; " The Egoist," 1879; " The Tragic 
Comedians," 188 1; "Diana of the Crossways," 1885; "One of 
Our Conquerors," 1890; "The Amazing Marriage," 1896. Still 
living. 

THOSE who have met George Meredith in re- 
cent years will retain a vivid memory of an 
extraordinarily vivacious old man, eloquent, 
humorous, rich in various knowledge, whose intellect 
age has scarcely dimmed with even a passing shadow, 
and whose natural force of mind is scarce abated. 
Virility is the outstanding quality of Meredith's old 
age. Virility is also the outstanding quality of all his 
work. The zest of life possesses him. He writes con- 
stantly as one for whom human life is a boundless 
good. Not even the long neglect of his contempo- 
raries has been able to save the native sweetness of 
his temper, or reduce its buoyancy. Yet few great 
writers have been received with greater coldness by 

* The basis of this chapter is found in the writer's article 
on George Meredith published in " Quest and Vision," 1892. 

191 



192 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the public. His first book of poems appeared at the 
same time as Tennyson's " In Memoriam." More 
than thirty years were to elapse before the general 
verdict gave him a place with the immortals. 

This delay of recognition is due in great part to the 
wilfulness and novelty of Meredith's style. It is a 
style brilliant almost beyond example in his contem- 
poraries ; but it is at times wilfully obscure in an 
almost equal degree. To those who love splendour, 
subtlety, and felicity of diction, combined with the 
most penetrating and suggestive thought, the writing 
of George Meredith is an unboundaried paradise. 
Roam where you will, a profusion of things dear to 
the delicate and discerning palate are found. Or, to 
change the figure, never was there so coruscating a 
style. The page perpetually breaks in star-sparkles; 
it flashes with all sorts of pyrotechnic displays, it is 
volcanic with eruptive radiance. Sometimes it is al- 
most mischievously coruscating, as though a boy ex- 
ploded crackers under you for the mere pleasure of 
seeing you jump. But one never knows how soon or 
suddenly the fire may go out, and you may find your- 
self plunged into the darkest by-ways of obscurity. 
Mr. Meredith has described Carlyle's style, and in do- 
ing so has partially described his own : 

A style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapi- 
dation, so loose and rough it seemed ; a wind-in-the-orchard 
style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit 
with uncouth bluster ; sentences without commencements run- 
ning to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea- 
wall, learned dictionaries giving a hand to street-slang, and 
accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving 
clouds; all the pages in' a breeze, the whole book producing a 
sort of electrical agitation in the mind and joints. 



^ GEORGE MEREDITH 193 

Neither of Carlyle nor Meredith is this description 
wholly true ; but, as Carlyle might have said, " it is 
significant of much " in both. To complain of too 
great brilliance is, no doubt, a novel complaint, yet in 
Meredith's case it is a very real one. Conceive a con- 
cert wherein all the music is allegro, or a gallery en- 
tirely full of Turner's most gorgeous sunsets, and you 
have a not inapt illustration of the effect produced by 
a continuous reading of George Meredith. The 
most brilliant thing suffers by a want of contrast. The 
last slow and solemn movement in a great sonata is all 
the more striking by contrast with that which has 
preceded it ; the finest Turner is yet finer if we see 
it after having seen some study of soft and tender 
greys. We miss the point of rest almost altogether in 
Meredith's work. He is so infinitely vivacious, versa- 
tile, and witty, so fertile in jest and epigram, so agile 
in the leaps and glances of his thought, so wayward 
and surprising, so conspicuously acute and clever, 
that less nimble minds pant breathless behind him, 
and even the nimblest have a difficulty in keeping pace 
with him. " She ran ahead of his thoughts like nimble 
fire," he says in one place of Mrs. Caroline Grandi- 
son. It is a just description of his own treatment of 
his readers ; and sometimes the fire we have followed 
with panting eagerness suddenly dances a will-o'-the- 
wisp fantasy of mirth and leaves us knee-deep in the 
bog. When once we become used to his method, no 
writer can afford so much intellectual exhilaration ; 
but it is little wonder, when we consider it, that the 
regular novel-reader is bewildered by so uncommon a 
guide and prefers some one much duller and safer. 
Intellectual gymnastics, however brilliant, are not what 



194 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

that patient and somewhat dull creature, " the general 
reader," looks for in a novel. 

It is altogether too late to enter upon the question so 
often raised in connection with Meredith's work — 
whether science ought to find a place in novels; the 
question is rather how large a space ought science to 
occupy. If this is a scientific age, and if the novel 
holds the mirror up to the age, science must needs be 
adequately reflected in it. Moreover, as one of Mere- 
dith's critics has truly said, the way of advance in 
English fiction lies through George Eliot and George 
Meredith — that is, through the only two novelists of 
our time who have come to their task with a complete 
scientific equipment. Is their work the better or worse 
for this equipment ? It may be answered that it is 
both. After all, the novel is not a psychological, and 
still less a physiological, treatise ; and there are mo- 
ments in the writing of both George Eliot and George 
Meredith when it becomes this and nothing more. 
The more a novelist knows the better will he write ; 
but when he pauses in his story to display his knowl- 
edge he becomes a pedant and ceases to be a novelist. 
The worst fault of Browning also lies in this direction ; 
there are times when his poetry runs into pedantry, and 
the reader of the " Paradise Lost " will note the same 
tendency in Milton. But it is possible, and it is com- 
mon, to exaggerate these blemishes, and people who 
do not care to be at any trouble in their reading tri- 
umphantly push these blemishes forward as an excuse 
for their intellectual indolence. To such people poetry 
and fiction are simply ingenious relaxations for the 
idle moments of life, of which they have too many, and 
they naturally demand the old commonplaces of pursu- 



GEORGE MEREDITH 195 

ing love and ultimate marriage-bells as the beginning 
and end of fiction, and resent a style of fiction which is 
charged with the gravest matter and is meant to make 
men think. Toward such readers George Meredith, 
and not less George Eliot and Browning, take up an 
attitude of irreconcilable defiance. They do so be- 
cause they regard their art as a serious business. They 
are of Milton's temper, and approach their task with 
a solemn invocation that what is dark in them may 
be illumined, what is weak strengthened, that they may 
rise to the height of their great argument. A sacred 
fire burns in them : for they are prophets, not hire- 
lings ; voices, not echoes ; artists, not artificers. Milton, 
George Eliot, and Browning have already triumphed, 
and compelled the world to listen: will not George 
Meredith also triumph in due season? 

Nevertheless, nothing could be more unjust than to 
say that George Meredith cannot tell a story or that 
his style is consistently obscure. The bulk of his stories 
are admirably conceived and executed, and for the 
most part the style is marvellous in its suppleness, its 
unflagging force and grace, its subtlety of flavour and 
suggestion, its flashes of inspiration, its intense con- 
cision, its actual splendour and poetry of phrase, its 
searching directness and nervous strength. He is a 
prose Browning, and his phrases are often as haunting 
as Browning's. He is the comrade of George Eliot, 
but is George Eliot's master both in force of intellect 
and poetic magnificence of diction. 

Why, then, we ask again, has it taken thirty years 
for Meredith to be known, and even now not widely 
known? The real reason lies in the fact that he has 
not the universal note of the popular writers. 



196 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Dickens, in his best work, and in spite of much that 
was tawdry, had that note; and George Eliot, also, in 
spite of much that was stiff and scholastic, at least in 
her earlier volumes. " David Copperfield " has a charm 
for the least and most cultured, and so has " Adam 
Bede." The shopman and the student alike read them, 
and each feels the charm, though it may be through 
widely differing channels. But great as are " The 
Ordeal of Richard Feverel " and " The Egoist," they 
are not conceived on that broadly human scale which 
is bound to draw all eyes, to move all hearts. They 
have height rather than breadth, a quality that is Mil- 
tonic rather than Shakespearean. They appeal irre- 
sistibly to the cultured, but scarcely at all to the crowd. 
Style, whether too brilliant or too obscure ; science, 
whether too obtrusively or too frequently thrust to 
the front, would not be sufficient barriers to dismay the 
mass of readers if the story itself struck the universal 
note and appealed to the deep heart of humanity. 

To recur again to a name which is inseparable from 
Meredith's, we may say that he and Browning stand 
in the same category. It is impossible to suppose that 
either can be widely read. Browning is not a people's 
poet, nor is Meredith a people's novelist. But in spite 
of this Browning, in his teaching and his influence, 
stands at the back of all the most influential teachers 
of our day, and is daily being reinterpreted by a thou- 
sand lips to ten thousands of persons who are ignorant 
of his poetry. In the same way Meredith is a fruitful 
force, working not directly but indirectly on the mass 
of readers, not in his own person so much as in a far 
wider degree through the persons of others who have 
received the impact of his teaching. It is perhaps 



GEORGE MEREDITH 197 

not as we could wish it, and not as he could wish it. 
But if it be for the present a thing inevitable there is 
this compensation, that as the race progresses he will 
become more and more visible in the general life, and 
may be read together with Browning by new genera- 
tions, when those who had their reward in this life are 
utterly forgotten. 

The two great weapons in which Meredith excels 
are satire and humour. The satire is never less than 
excellent, for in the mere literary finish of his biting 
epigrams he is unsurpassed by any writer of English, 
either past or present. The fault of the satire is that 
it is not kindly, and it can be cruel. It is as keen as 
a surgeon's knife, and as cold. It lays bare all the 
hidden disease of the human soul, and cuts relentlessly, 
almost savagely, through the intervening filaments. 
Not in all literature is there to be found so terrible 
an exposition of selfishness as in the character of Sir 
Willoughby Pattern, the Egoist. If it were possible 
to light up a human body from the inside, so that it 
should become transparent to us, like a glass bee-hive, 
in which we see every movement of busy wing or 
tentacle, so that in like manner we might discern every 
little beating nerve of man, every throb and palpitation 
of remotest vein and artery, it would be an apt figure 
of how Meredith treats the soul of man. He conceals 
nothing — he concedes nothing; he simply flashes his 
terrible searchlight into the secret places of the heart, 
and things explain themselves. Coiling one inside the 
other, restless with vehement and loathsome vitality, 
we see the mass of serpentine motives, the mean and 
wicked impulses, which lurk in the bottom of the 
human ego. Pleasant? — no, it is not pleasant; but 



198 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

how true it is ! How wholesome it is for us to be 
driven sometimes into this searching analysis of our- 
selves! We pause a hundred times in the reading of 
the " Egoist " and shudder, for we have found out 
something about ourselves which we did not suspect, 
or of which we were fearfully and faintly conscious, 
as of a skeleton in the cupboard, known to us, but 
judiciously and gratefully ignored. Meredith refuses 
to be our accomplice in any such deception. He forces 
us to face the ghastly secret of the human cupboard. 
" Sacred reality," he tells us, is the goddess he wor- 
ships ; and he argues that it cannot be wise or right for 
any of us to go about in ignorance of what we really 
are. His satire is the child of relentless truth ; it is 
indeed truth itself, naked, severe, uncompromising. 

No more striking example of this rigorous satirical 
analysis is to be found than in Meredith's exposure of 
what Sir Willoughby's desire for purity in woman 
really means. He demands of his betrothed that she 
should be cloistral. " Women of mixed essences, 
shading off the divine to the considerably lower, were 
outside his vision of women." He demands " purity 
infinite, spotless bloom." The commonplace observer 
will at once say, Of how admirable and clean a nature 
must be this man who can be content with nothing 
less than " purity infinite " in woman. Not at all, says 
Meredith — entirely the reverse. It is nothing but a 
" voracious aesthetic gluttony." " It has its founda- 
tion in the sensual," and this vast and dainty exacting 
appetite is lineally " the great-grandson of the Hoof." 
Why does he frantically demand this immaculate, this 
more than human bloom? It is the exaction of a 
gluttonous, sensual appetite. It is more than that ; for 



GEORGE MEREDITH 199 

him there must needs be fashioned " a perfect speci- 
men designed for the elect of men." There the secret 
is out ; the demand is but another tentacle of that ink- 
spitting cuttlefish Egoism, which works uneasily in the 
mud of the human heart, and stretches itself on all 
sides in insatiable craving. " And," adds Meredith, 
" the capaciously strong in soul among women will 
ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand 
for purity infinite, spotless bloom." What you have 
supposed the demand of austerity is the passionate 
shriek of voluptuousness, and the strong-souled among 
women will find you out. 

Meredith's satire allied to analysis is sometimes cruel, 
but when it is allied to humour it is delightful. It is 
then the smack of the sea-salt that gives edge to the 
sunny breeze. He can be droll, quaint, genial ; he 
can jest and gambol like a boy or shout with Homeric 
laughter. He who has not read " Evan Harrington " 
has before him several hours of unmitigated laughter. 
For broad humour — in one or two instances a trifle 
too broad for good taste — it would be hard to surpass 
that memorable cricket supper at the Green Dragon, 
Fallowfield, and the eccentric behaviour of John Raikes 
thereat. The hat of John Raikes alone is provocative 
of infinite mirth. " I mourn my hat. He is old — I 
mourn him yet living. The presence of crape on him 
signifies he shall ne'er have a gloss again. The fact 
is my hat is a burden in the staring crowd. A hat like 
this should counsel solitude." In another spirit, but 
as genially humorous, is the famous description of Mrs. 
Caroline Grandison, in " Richard Feverel." " She was 
a colourless lady, of an unequivocal character, living 
upon drugs, and governing her husband and the world 



200 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

from her sofa. Woolly Negroes blessed her name, and 
whiskered John Thomases deplored her weight." She 
had rapidly produced eight daughters, and felt the 
solemnity of woman's mission. A son was denied her. 
Her husband, the quite unobjectionable gentleman, lost 
heart after the arrival of the eighth, and surrendered 
his mind to more frivolous pursuits. After that dis- 
appointing eighth she also lost heart and " relapsed 
upon religion and little dogs." But to give samples 
of Meredith's humour were an endless task. It runs 
through a hundred variations, from the keenest to the 
broadest; it smacks of Jingle and of Falstaff; it is 
sometimes plain farce, at others finished comedy ; it 
is acute, genial, caustic ; it is now hilarious with boy- 
ish buoyancy and good spirits, now the product of 
masculine good sense and piercing insight, now a shaft 
of laughter playing round a fountain of tears ; and, 
widely as it differs, running through the gamut from 
the verbal quip to the profoundly human delineation, 
from merely comic to half-tragic laughter, it is a per- 
vasive element, with which all his books are lavishly 
endowed. As a mere humorist Meredith is as superior 
to those ephemeral writers who pass as such to-day 
as is Shakespeare to Douglas Jerrold. 

To Meredith, as to Thackeray, and with equal ignor- 
ance and lack of insight, the term " cynic " has been 
generally applied. If the cynic is he who sneers at 
good, then no man has less deserved the reproach. 
But when such terms are used no one stops to consider 
what they imply, and to call a man a cynic is the only 
refuge of Philistine mediocrity, which above all things 
dreads satire, and is afraid of being laughed at for not 
understanding what breeds laughter in others. We may 



GEORGE MEREDITH 201 

admit that there is sometimes a disagreeable flavour 
in some of Meredith's scenes and phrases. One knows 
not how to define it, except to say that in such cases 
his robust masculinity touches in a fugitive fashion 
the verge of grossness. But of cynicism, of the spirit 
which mocks and derides, he has no trace ; on the con- 
trary, one is struck by the broad humanity of his 
writings, their essential buoyancy and good humour. 
And this is the more remarkable when we recollect 
that he has been condemned by the public to thirty 
years of almost total neglect, during which period he 
has had the mortification of seeing a score of writers 
with not a tithe of his genius press to the front and 
become the acknowledged representatives of English 
fiction. The " Ordeal " of George Meredith will make 
one of the most surprising chapters of that history of 
literature which our sons will write one day. For 
him, as for Browning, has been ordained a quarter of 
a century of deaf ears and mocking mouths; and how 
much does it say for the genuine greatness of each that 
they were able to keep a tranquil soul, an unembittered 
mind, and emerge from the cloud of neglect as the 
great optimists of their generation ! 

If we will take the trouble to analyse this so-called 
cynicism, we shall see at once that its component ele- 
ments are really moral intensity and love of " sacred 
reality." To tell the plain truth is often to say a bitter 
thing, and for a good many people anything bitter is 
called cynical. And the supreme moral value of George 
Meredith's writing is its absolute witness to truth. He 
glosses over nothing. He sees clearly " the reddened 
sources " from which even the noblest passions spring. 
He is profoundly convinced that we can gain nothing 



202 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

in the long-run by ignoring any element of truth about 
ourselves. To leave the body out of consideration in 
our epitome of man is as fatal a blunder as to ignore 
the soul. To collect only the finest qualities of a man 
or woman into a sort of odorous nosegay and call that 
human nature is to commit an outrage on justice. The 
earth grows weeds as well as flowers, and so does hu- 
man nature. Let us have, then, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth ; it will do us less harm to know 
everything than to know only what it will please us 
best to know. That is the great lesson of his greatest 
book, " Richard Feverel " ; and never was a lesson 
taught with more impressive power. " The system," 
as he derisively calls it, that marvellous system which 
is to produce a perfect youth by picking and choosing 
among the elements of things, by building walls here 
to close up dangerous paradises, and opening gateways 
there into sterile moral Saharas, by twisting this pro- 
clivity into grotesqueness, like a bruised vine upon a 
pole, and diverting the natural course of that taste or 
passion till it makes for itself feculent puddles instead 
of flowing purely in its natural bed — this system, care- 
fully pieced together, mechanical, rigid, meant to mu- 
tilate life at every point, and produce perfection by 
mutilation, in the end works nothing but havoc, ruin, 
and death to all whom it concerns. And the secret of 
its failure lies in the fact that it is not based upon the 
truth of things. " Great is truth, and must prevail," 
is the constant chant of George Meredith ; and not less 
passionately than Carlyle does he perpetually affirm 
that truth is always wholesome, and a half-truth is the 
worst of lies. 

The moral intensity of Meredith often becomes al- 



GEORGE MEREDITH 203 

most prophetic in its passion. " You cannot cheat na- 
ture," he insists over and over again. Nowhere in 
fiction is there a more tremendous sermon on the in- 
evitable consequences of sin than in that chapter of 
"Richard Feverel " called "The Wild Oats Plea." 
Every youth should read it ; it is a prophet's scroll to be 
thrust into his hand as he steps over the threshold of 
boyhood into the fulness of manhood. Sir Austin Fev- 
erel calls upon two ancient intimates, Lord Heddon 
and Darley Absworthy, " useful men though gouty, 
who had sown in their time a fine crop of wild oats, 
and advocated the advantage of doing so, seeing that 
they did not fancy themselves the worse for it." He 
found one with an imbecile son and the other with 
consumptive daughters. " So much," he wrote in his 
note-book, " for the wild oats theory ! " 

Darley was proud of his daughters' white-and-pink 
skins. Beautiful complexions, he called them. The 
eldest was in the market, immensely admired. There 
was something poetic about her. 

She intimated that she was robust, but toward the close of 
their conversation her hand would now and then travel to her 
side, and she breathed painfully an instant, saying, " Isn't it 
odd? Dora, Adela, and myself, we all feel the same queer 
sensation — about the heart; I think it is — after talking much." 

Sir Austin nodded and blinked sadly, exclaiming 
to his soul, " Wild oats ! wild oats ! " 

Lord Heddon vehemently preached wild oats also. 
He was of opinion that a lad is all the better for a 
" little racketing when he's green." He had always 
found the best fellows were wildish once, etc. 

" How's your son ? " asked Sir Austin. 



204 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

" Oh, Lipscombe's always the same," replied the 
gouty advocate of wild oats. " He's quiet — that's one 
good thing; but there's no getting the country to take 
him, so I must give up hopes of that." 

Lord Lipscombe entering the room just then, Sir 
Austin surveyed him, and was not astonished at the 
refusal of the country to take him. 

" Wild oats ! wild oats ! " again thinks the baronet, 
as he contemplates the headless, degenerate, weedy 
issue and result. 

He was content to remark that he thought the third 
generation of wild oats would be a pretty thin crop. 

The " Ordeal of Richard Feverel " is a great book 
because it is a profoundly wise book. The wise books 
of the world, the books which embalm the deepest 
lessons of experience and thus attain to a sort of 
sacred value, are few, and thus become of necessity 
the classics of literature. This is such a book, and it 
is not only wise but witty, and is throughout executed 
in Meredith's most brilliant manner. There are say- 
ings in it which cannot be forgotten ; they are as 
memorable as the sayings of Gautama or Confucius, 
of Marcus Aurelius or Augustine, and might be the 
fit texts for great sermons. 

Take, at random, some half-a-dozen sentences from 
that half-tragic note-book of Sir Austin's "The Pil- 
grim's Scrip," a book in which every record has the 
diamond's worth and lustre, and let us hope, the 
diamond's unchanging endurance too. 

How profoundly religious are these aphorisms : 

Expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right is God's. 
Until he has had some deep sorrow he will not find the divine 
want of prayer. 



GEORGE MEREDITH 205 

Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered. 

For this reason so many fall from God who have attained to 
Him, that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with 
their strength. 

And how keenly do these cut: 

Nature is not all dust. Through Nature only can we ascend. 
St. Simeon saw the Hog in Nature, and took Nature for the 
Hog. 

It is the tendency of very fast people to grow organically 
downward. 

O women, who like and will have for hero a rake ! how soon 
are you not to learn that you have taken bankrupts to your 
bosoms, and that the putrescent gold that attracted you is the 
slime of the Lake of Sin ! 

Or, to conclude with three that touch a sunnier 
height : 

The compensation for injustice is that in the darkest ordeal 
we gather the worthiest round us. 

There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness — from that 
uttermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this world 
is well designed. 

And this most perfect of lovers' petitions: 

Give me purity to be worthy the good in her, and grant her 
patience to reach the good in me. 

And these are but the chance gleanings of a book 
which it has taken all these years to lift into even 
moderate eminence, and which beyond its wisdom and 
its humour has every quality of art and genius which 
can make a novel great. The one consolation in the 



206 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

remembrance is that in this long ordeal of injustice 
George Meredith has not failed to gather the worthiest 
round him. 

To catalogue qualities, and speak of pathos, humour, 
and imagination, and make quotations is an easy task, 
but one feels that after all it amounts to little. The 
real greatness of George Meredith lies in something 
deeper and more inclusive ; it is that he is a great 
poet who has chosen chiefly to work in prose. His 
poetic force is behind all he writes ; it is the animating 
soul of all. It is perpetually thrusting aside the heavy 
garments of prose and flashing out upon us in thoughts 
and phrases which startle and fascinate us as only 
poetry can. How exquisite is that whole picture of 
Richard reading the diary of the dead Clare, with its 
secrecies of unconfessed affections, its pathetic hum- 
bleness, its meek reproach ! 

He could not read for tears. It was midnight. The hour 
seemed to belong to her. The awful stillness and the darkness 
were Clare's. Clare Doria Forey ! He knew the music of that 
name. It sounded faint and mellow now behind the hills of 
death. 

Is not this poetry too? — 

He pronounced love a little modestly, as it were a blush In 
his voice. 

When Sandra's song is finished, the stillness settles 
back again " like one folding up a precious jewel." 
And where are there any passages in the whole realm 
of fiction so full of lyric rapture, so intoxicating in 
their charm of perfect beauty, as those which describe 



GEORGE MEREDITH 207 

the first waking of love in Richard Feverel? George 
Meredith's greatest moments are in the interpretation 
of young love and nature, and here he does both. 

The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth 
southern cloud lying along the blue ; from a dewy copse stand- 
ing dark over her nodding hat the blackbird flitted, calling to 
her with thrice mellow note ; the kingfisher flashed emerald 
out of the green osiers ; a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, 
seeking solitude ; a boat slipped toward her containing a dreamy 
youth. 

Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two 
electric clouds. 

To-morrow this place will have a memory — the river and 
the meadow, and the white falling weir. His heart will build 
a temple here, and the skylark will be its high-priest and the 
old blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a 
sacred repast of dewberries. . . . 

Golden lie the meadows, golden run the streams, red-gold is 
on the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and 
walks the fields and the waters. 

The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the 
waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his her- 
alds run before him and touch the leaves of oaks and planes 
and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems redder gold, leav- 
ing brightest footsteps upon thickly weeded banks, where the 
fox-glove's last upper-bells incline, and bramble-shoots wander 
amid moist, rich herbage. 

For this is the home of enchantment. Here, secluded from 
vexed shores, the prince and princess of the island meet ; here, 
like darkling nightingales, they sit, and into eyes and ears and 
hands pour endless ever-fresh treasures of their souls. 

Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, a 
sheepboy pipes to meditative eve on a penny whistle. Love's 



208 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

musical instrument is as old, and as poor; it has but two stops, 
and yet you see the cunning musician does thus much with it. 

The tide of colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In the 
west the sea of sunken fire draws back, and the stars leap 
forth and tremble and retire before the advancing moon, who 
slips the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, and with her 
foot upon the pine-tops surveys heaven. 

Young as when she looked upon the lovers in Paradise, the 
fair immortal journeys onward. Fronting her it is not night, 
but veiled day. Full half the sky is flushed. Not darkness; 
not day; but the nuptials of the two. 

A soft beam travels to the fern-covert under the pine-wood 
where they sit, and for answer he has her eyes — turned to him 
an instant, timidly fluttering over the depths of his, and then 
downcast; for through her eyes her soul is naked to him. 

" Lucy ! my bride ! my life ! " 

The night-jar spins his dark monotony on the branch of the 
pine. The soft beam travels round them and listens to their 
hearts. Their lips are locked. 

Pipe no more, Love, for a time ! Pipe as you will, you can- 
not express their first kiss — nothing of its sweetness, and of 
the sacredness of it nothing. St. Cecilia up aloft, before the 
silver organ-pipes of paradise, pressing fingers upon all the 
notes of which Love is but one, from her you may hear it. 

The women-characters of George Meredith are 
worthy of an essay to themselves. They are intensely 
living, and intensely human. It was one of Lord 
Byron's fads to pretend disgust at seeing women eat. 
It has been well said of George Meredith's women 
that they eat and are not ashamed. Woman is to him 
no sentimental abstraction, no impossible deity ; it 
delights him to show us that she is flesh and blood, 
and none the worse for it; that in intellectual power 
she is mate of man, and in moral power his superior, 
because she lives closer to the heart of nature; that, 



GEORGE MEREDITH 209 

in fact, the angel is as false a description as the animal, 
and that in any case the correcter our estimate of her 
the higher will be her honour. He will have nothing 
to do with the doctrine that woman is but "undeveloped 
man," and he roundly denounces it as a lie. The mas- 
culine and feminine are for ever different in scope, 
sphere, and essence ; yet men " who have the woman 
in them without being womanised are the pick of men. 
And the choicest women are those who yield not a 
feather of their womanliness for some amount of 
manlike strength — man's brain, woman's heart." She 
needs no spurious daintiness to recommend her. Let 
her come to us in native naturalness, and she will save 
us ; for " women have us back to the conditions of 
primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the top- 
most star." Again and again does George Meredith 
insist, as Mr. Le Gallienne admirably puts it, that " a 
man's relations to woman, how he regards her, how 
he acts toward her, are the most significant things 
about him." And for the man who misapprehends or 
misuses her there is tragic vengeance ; " for women 
are not the end but the means of life, and they punish 
us for so perverting their uses. They punish society." 
The chief thing, from the moral point of view, 
which fills the mind after a thorough perusal of 
George Meredith's works is their robust hopefulness. 
He has gone down to the sources of life; he has un- 
covered its worst secrets; he has surprised the unsus- 
pected and dragged into light the ignored elements of 
conduct; he has been utterly true in his fealty to 
" sacred reality," but he has retained, in and through 
all, his geniality, his faith in God and man, his hope 
for the world. He has told us that the only chance 



210 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of happiness is the belief that this world is well de- 
signed, and this is his own belief ; and he adds through 
the lips of his Diana of the Crossways, " Who can 
really think and not think hopefully?" Like so many 
of his aphorisms, this is one that goes to the root of 
things and expresses a philosophy. It would seem to 
teach that pessimism is the disease of shallow minds, 
a surface complaint which attacks mainly the less 
forceful and efficient natures of the race; the wider 
and deeper natures have too strong a vitality to be its 
victims. Go deep enough, he says, and you will find 
that the source of hope and vital joy are not dried up. 
You will find no chaos, but a most Divine Cosmos, to 
know which is to rejoice in life. Despair is a disease; 
the sane and sound nature must needs be hopeful. A 
little thought, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous 
thing, and may breed pessimism. A little more thought 
takes one out of the storm-belt into the far-reaching 
sunlight. " I think it al'ays the plan in a dielcmmer," 
says the wise Mrs. Berry, " to pray God and walk for- 
ward." Nor can any better plan be invented for the 
guidance of bewildered souls. There is, of course, a 
thoughtless optimism, as there is a thoughtless pessim- 
ism — the optimism of those who recognise no problems 
or dilemmas in life, and whose gaiety is the mere 
frisking ebullience of the happy animal. But the glory 
of George Meredith's optimism is that, having seen 
the worst, he believes in the best. Having touched 
the lowest depth, he still has eyes to discover the 
starry height, and has ears to hear the music of the 
spheres. In this resolute and intelligent optimism he 
and Robert Browning once more find themselves akin ; 
nor can the spirit of Meredith's work be better ex- 



GEORGE MEREDITH 211 

pressed than by putting into his lips the well-known 
verse of Browning: 

I have gone the whole round of creation : I saw and I spoke ; 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my brain 
And pronounced on the rest of His handwork — returned Him 

again 
His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw, 
I report as a man may on God's work — all's love, yet all's law. 

With so much of real and rare genius, with a tem- 
perament essentially poetic, with a style full of felicity 
and surprise, with a mastery of means rarely surpassed 
by any great artist, it would seem that George Mere- 
dith has all the qualities which secure and win fame. 
And yet a doubt remains which is not easily dismissed. 
The doubt lies in the direction already indicated — viz., 
Meredith's failure to interest the broad average of 
mankind. Is he, after all, a vogue? Does he belong 
to the esoteric class of writers who appeal only to the 
initiated? Will he ultimately find his rank with such 
a writer as Landor, who possessed undoubted genius, 
and was in the strictest sense a great writer, yet failed 
of popular fame, and must always fail, because he had 
neither the instinct nor the will to address himself to 
the popular taste? Such questions can* scarcely be 
answered by Meredith's contemporaries; but even the 
most reverential of his contemporaries may be excused 
some uneasiness in their contemplation. For, as one 
returns to the study of Meredith after an interval of 
years, the critical mind is increasingly conscious of an 
element of brilliant artificiality in his work. He has 
never discovered the truth that the last art of pro- 
fundity is simplicity. One suspects also a certain 



212 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

element of contempt for humanity in Meredith's tem- 
per — the contempt of the superior person, who despises 
the vulgar average, and counts their praise or blame 
as of little consequence. This is Landor's great fault, 
and it has circumscribed his fame. In the writer of 
fiction it is a fatal fault. For in the writer of fiction 
something more is needed than the most brilliant intel- 
lectual gifts ; he needs above all that kind of sympathy 
which enters into and interprets common life — the 
broad human touch which we find in all the truly great 
novelists, from Defoe to Dickens, which is the real 
secret of their enduring influence. Nevertheless, the 
outstanding fact is clear, that Meredith's contribution 
to the imaginative literature of his age is of a quality 
so high, and an achievement so rare and distinguished, 
that, if it does not put him in the first rank of novel- 
ists, it gives him a position which is unique and con- 
spicuous. He is the most intellectual of English 
novelists. With such a fame he may rest content. If 
he does not take rank with Scott and Thackeray, he 
does appeal, as no other English novelist does, to the 
ear of a discriminating culture. Like Landor, he will 
" dine late ; but the dining-room will be well lighted, 
the guests few and select." 



XVI 
THOMAS HARDY 

Thomas Hardy, bom at Upper Rockhampton, Dorset, June 
2nd, 1840. Published "Desperate Remedies," 1871; "Under 
the Greenwood Tree',' 1872; "A Pair erf Blue Eyes," 1872-3; 
""Far from the Madding Crowd," 1874; " The Hand of Ethel- 
berta," 1876; " The Return of the Native " ; " Tzuo on a Tower," 
1882; " The Mayor of Caste rbr id ge," 1884-5; " The W oodland- 
ers," 1886-7; " Tess of the D'Urbervilles," 189 1; " Jude the 
Obscure," 1895. Still living. 

TO Thomas Hardy must be conceded the first 
place among the later novelists, although it 
is probable that his claim, for a considerable 
time to come, will not be admitted without dispute. 
Those who look first to the purely intellectual qualities 
of a novelist will easily justify the primacy of Mere- 
dith, who as a brilliant philosophic thinker, working in 
the medium of romance, has no rival. Compared with 
the subtly coloured page of Meredith, Hardy's page is 
plain and grey ; destitute alike of those surprises and 
felicities which make Meredith's writing so exciting 
to the cultured reader. But if Hardy's style has little 
splendour, it has a certain grave Lucretian lucidity 
which* is very impressive. He ranks with Crabbe 
among the sternest painters of man's social life. His 
chief aim is truth ; and hence whatever superficial 
graces he may lack, he never fails in the grace of a 
severe sincerity. The parallel with Crabbe may be 

213 



214 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

pushed further. He has much of Crabbe's relative 
narrowness of vision, with a corresponding intensity, 
except that in Crabbe's case this narrowness is un- 
avoidable, but with Hardy intentional and deliberate. 
Crabbe lives in a narrow world from necessity, Hardy 
from choice. It is his boast that in this narrow world, 
among people of the humblest social type, he finds the 
great elements of the human drama, and the develop- 
ment upon a tragic scale of all those motives which 
would have contented the dramatic genius of Sophocles 
and Aeschylus. 

Two outstanding facts may be briefly noted. The 
first is that Hardy's perfect knowledge of rural life is 
his by inheritance and training. He was born in the 
heart of the woodland, at Upper Bockhampton, near 
Dorchester, a place so tiny that it is scarcely known to 
the ordnance maps. A recent writer, in describing it, 
says, " In country parlance it is an outstep spot, difficult 
of access even to those who know the neighbourhood. 
The walk thither from the market-town, in spring or 
summer, is delightful to those who love the green 
pageantry of Nature. Just a narrow track across a 
meadow is taken, and the doors of the modern world 
swing to their closing, and an entrance is gained into 
a region where life is hushed by the sway and tremble 
of leaves, mirrored in a stream that seldom breaks the 
garment of stillness by a liquid rush or fall. . . . 
Upper Bockhampton is but the germ of a village, and 
continues to this day, in point of dimensions, in a state 
of unambitious infancy, bespeaking the first primitive 
needs of human nature without any visible hint of 
sophisticated desires. The cottage home is there seen 
in its typical simplicity — the living-room stone-flagged, 



THOMAS HARDY 215 

the ceiling cross-beamed, the chimney spacious, with a 
fire of wood on the hearth enclosed by uncemented 
bricks." In this primitive abode Hardy was born, and 
there, but the other day, his mother died. It is a rare 
thing in literary biography to find a man of genius 
so deliberately rooted to the soil of his birth that the 
larger world has no attractions for him. Even the 
greatest novelists have felt change of scene necessary 
as a stimulus to their art, and it is the habit of most 
modern novelists to seek new backgrounds for their 
work, in order to retain public interest. It rarely 
happens that backgrounds so sought are impressive, or 
even true. They may have a certain superficial accur-» 
acy — the accuracy of the guide-book, as George Eliot's 
Florence has in " Romola " — but they fail to convey 
the spirit of the scene. Art expresses best what is 
normal to the artist. Scenery has to be felt, and 
slowly absorbed, before it can be truly described. The 
secret of Hardy's unique power in rendering rural 
scenes, is that they are essential to himself. They are 
a part of his own blood and fibre. They belong to his 
heritage as peasant and woodlander, and are expressive 
of his temperament. 

A second notable feature of his art is a certain spirit 
of continuity in his design. Perhaps it was from 
Balzac he derived his idea of a series of books which 
should represent with more or less fulness the human 
comedy, but he interprets the idea after his own 
fashion. He creates for himself a district called Wes- 
sex — re-naming the actual towns, rivers, and hills in 
a nomenclature which is meant to be no more than a 
thin disguise of the real nomenclature. Thus Caster- 
bridge is Dorchester, Budmouth Regis is Weymouth, 



216 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Warbourne is Wimbourne, King's Bere is Bere Regis, 
Sherton Abbas is Sherbourne, Shaston is Shaftesbury, 
Wintoncester is Winchester, and so forth. Within this 
area every road is known to him, every legend, every 
antiquarian reminiscence, together with hundreds of 
family histories and traditional episodes. The names 
he uses for his characters are usually local names, pe- 
culiar to the soil. The result of this painstaking fidel- 
ity is an extraordinary air of verisimilitude in his 
stories. They are not so much stories, in the conven- 
tional use of the term, as histories interpreted by the 
imagination. It is true that he does not, like Balzac, 
introduce the characters of former novels into suc- 
ceeding stories, expecting us to recollect them, and 
recognise them as actors in one common and con- 
tinuous drama, but he attains the same effect of 
continuity even more subtly by retaining the same 
scenery. It is a bold experiment, which might easily 
produce the same sense of sameness, but Hardy con- 
ducts it with such supreme skill, that familiarity 
becomes a new bond of attraction. We begin to be 
interested in these scenes for their own sake, and we 
realise the truth of his contention that there is in their 
apparent peace ample material for Sophoclean drama, 
all the passions that torture or deprave humanity lying 
like volcanic fire beneath the apparent secular repose. 
Greatness of design must always be reckoned as one 
of the most original features of Hardy's art. He may 
or may not have succeeded — this is a question for the 
critic — but he stands alone among English novelists 
in the coherent definiteness of his scheme. 

Here, then, to begin with, is what we may call the 
large note in literary art. Hardy sets himself to a 



THOMAS HARDY 217 

task which is meant not only to be an adequate expres- 
sion of his own genius, but a broad synthesis of human 
life. He has certain definite convictions to express, 
and in order to express them he invents a wide frame- 
work, and he adopts a logical scheme. Just as Balzac 
takes a group of people and develops them; just as 
Zola follows the same immense ideal; so Hardy an- 
nexes for his purpose a district of England of which 
he has special knowledge, and peoples it with the 
creatures of his art. Although he does not write his 
novels as a deliberate series, yet they are all closely 
connected in spirit and design. The people he depicts 
are in reality members of one family. They represent 
primitive, and almost primeval types. They epitomise 
the struggles and passions of the race. They pro- 
pound in their histories the eternal riddle of the uni- 
verse. Thus, the first and clearest impression con- 
veyed by Hardy's novels is of fundamental brainwork 
in their conception. Every slightest detail is thought 
out with exactness ; he obeys no chance impulses, and 
never wanders from the path which he has set himself. 
It may be said of many novels which are distinctly 
works of genius that, while they represent a certain 
phase of the author's thought, they do not represent 
any fundamental truth, nor do they even represent the 
real secret of the author's idiosyncrasy. But this 
cannot be said of Hardy. He has no dealings with 
the casual. He is always at work upon his scheme. 
And this extraordinary definiteness of aim, this spirit 
of severe dedication to his task, produces an epic force, 
which constitutes the " larger note " in literary art. 

The names of Balzac and Zola naturally suggest 
themselves in relation to continuity of design, but we 



218 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

must not be misled by the parallel. In the main 
qualities of 'his art, Hardy has little in common with 
them. Hardy's art is m-arked by strong original 
features which are peculiar to himself. Some of these 
we may now consider. 

Putting them in the order of their significance, we 
may range these qualities thus: Nature-worship, 
austerity, logic, melancholy, humour. 

The Nature-worship of Hardy controls and colours 
all his writing. Towards religion, in the conventional 
sense, his temper is hostile ; he is a pagan, whose faiths 
and sentiments are rooted in a world so ancient that 
the religious thoughts of the last two thousand years 
fail to find any point of contact with it. He regards 
the entire problem of Christianity much as an antique 
Roman of Virgil's countryside might have regarded 
it. Such religious sentiment as he has attaches itself 
to things immemorially sacred — the march of seasons, 
the loom of silent powers weaving the web of life, the 
worship of fecundity, the spirit of creativeness, the 
sense of the eternal in time. Wordsworth has no 
deeper passion for the silent hills than he for the 
woodlands, valleys, and wide heaths of Wessex. 
Hence his men and women are not so many persons 
set against a background of Nature, but they are its 
vital growths and manifestations. Nature interprets 
them, and they interpret Nature. The scenery of the 
woodland is essential to the understanding of such 
characters as Giles Winterbourne and Marty South. 
Divorced from the scenery they are weak and mean- 
ingless ; moving in it, they are so much a part of it 
that they express its primeval grandeur. There is an 
actual sympathy between them and the woodland. The 



THOMAS HARDY 219 

tree-roots know the touch of Winterbourne's skilled 
hand ; they will grow for him, as they would not for 
another. Egdon Heath is much more than the back- 
ground of that great story " The Return of the Na- 
tive " ; it is a brooding and a shaping presence, touch- 
ing the life of each actor in the drama in turn. In this 
art of producing entire unity between the man and the 
scene in which he moves Hardy is supreme. Hetty 
Sorrel and Adam Bede might have lived in any pleas- 
ant rural hamlet; but Winterbourne and Marty South 
belong to one scene only, and are inconceivable apart 
from it. Even the virtuous and sturdy persons Words- 
worth celebrates might exist apart from the actual 
hillsides where he found them ; but Hardy's peasants 
are as much products of a particular soil as the glades 
in which they live. Nature herself breathes and speaks 
through them ; and so much is this the case, that as we 
follow their fates it is with the sense that Nature has 
a constant hand in the business, she is the predominant 
partner, and they are as much the products of ber 
inscrutable will as the leaves upon the tree, or the 
crops upon the field. 

To depict scenery is not in itself a novel art ; but to 
render the spirit of scenery is rare, and it is still more 
rare to render it through human personifications in 
whom its peculiar qualities are concentrated. What 
is it that rivets the gaze on the apparently paltry for- 
tunes of Mrs. Yeobright, Gym, Eustacia Vye, and 
Wildeve in " The Return of the Native " ? It is the 
sense of something elemental acting in them, and act- 
ing and re-acting through them. They are the handi- 
work of powers older than the oldest civilisation ; they 
move to the silent rhythm of forces ancient as the stars. 



220 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Thus they become elemental through perfect unison 
with the eternal elements of things. And for the 
spectator of the drama, Egdon Heath is the symbol of 
the elemental. The human artist is unseen ; " haggard 
Egdon " is the spell-worker. The eye never loses the 
vision of Egdon presented in the first pages of the 
book. We see its barrenness and beauty ; we feel its 
awe, its separate and peculiar solitude, its immense 
antiquity, older than all empire, and older than the sea 
itself; and there is subtly conveyed to us the sense that 
the drama of the Yeobrights and Eustacia Vye is of an 
equal antiquity and grandeur. It never occurs to us 
that they are quite ordinary people ; Egdon Heath 
sublimes them. If we think of it, this is one of the 
most extraordinary miracles of art. And this power 
of creating and maintaining perfect unison between 
the physical world and human character is a power 
found in varying degrees in all Hardy's novels. It is 
in reality a method of interpreting Nature much more 
subtle than the most eloquent description of Ruskin's, 
or even those exquisite passages of depiction that lin- 
ger longest with us in the pages of Wordsworth and 
other great poets. It reveals a closer intimacy of 
passion, in which the personality of the artist is wholly 
subdued or extinguished ; he standing aside that 
Nature may be all in all. 

It is a secondary matter, but nevertheless a great 
matter, in Hardy's art, that his actual pictures of 
Nature have a rare exquisiteness of fidelity. It would 
be difficult to name any other English writer who has 
shown so true and fine a colour sense. Notice, for 
example, the part that colour plays in this description 
of Egdon Heath: 



THOMAS HARDY 221 

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the 
time of twilight, and the vast tract of enclosed wild known as 
Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Over- 
head the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky- 
was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor. The 
heavens being spread with this pallid screen and the earth 
with the darkest vegetation, their meeting line at the horizon 
was clearly marked. . . . The face of the heath by its 
mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in 
like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the 
frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the 
opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and 
dread. 

In a totally different tone of colour, but equally 
exact, is the description of dawn in the opening chap- 
ters of " The Hand of Ethelberta." 

A huge inflamed sun was breasting the horizon of a wide 
sheet of sea, which, to her surprise and delight, the mansion 
overlooked. The brilliant disc fired all the waves that lay 
between it and the shore at the bottom of the grounds, where 
the water tossed the ruddy light from one undulation to 
another in glares as large and clear as mirrors, incessantly 
altering them, destroying them, and creating them again; 
while further off they multiplied, thickened, and ran into one 
another like struggling armies, till they met the fiery source 
of them all. 

In the " Woodlanders " is a yet more daring tran- 
script of aerial sublimities : 

Between the broken clouds they could see far into the 
recesses of heaven, the eye journeying on under a species of 
golden arcades, and past fiery obstruction, fancied cairns, 
loganstones, stalactites, and stalagmites of topaz. Deeper than 
this their gaze passed these flakes of incandescence, till it 
plunged into a bottomless medium of soft green fire. 



222 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

And with this power of reporting large effects in 
scenery of sea and sky and broad heath, there is also 
joined the most observant eye for minute and humble 
details in ordinary landscape. 

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled 
through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with 
spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands 
wearing green gloves ; elbowed old elms and ashes with great 
forks in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy 
days, and ran down their stumps in green cascades. On older 
trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. 
Here, as everywhere, the unfulfilled intention, which makes 
life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the de- 
praved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the 
curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate 
the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death 
the promising sapling. 

These are but casual examples of a singularly fertile 
art. There is no book of Hardy's that does not abound 
in Nature-pictures, some delicately etched, some com- 
posed of broad masses of colour, but all carefully 
observed by a consummate artist. But their chief 
quality, as we have seen, is not in the beauty or daring 
of the detached picture, but in its relation to human 
destinies. Nature and man are constantly engaged in 
expressing the same thought. We are often reminded, 
in reading Hardy, of Millet's picture of " The Ange- 
lus," in which the bowed peasants and the scenery of 
bare fields and setting sun in which they are placed 
are so intimately interwoven that the pathos of the 
picture is as much in one as in the other ; it is a whole 
so harmonious that every detail has equal significance. 
Hardy himself has insisted, in a striking passage of 



THOMAS HARDY 

the " Woodlanders," that the true charm of the country 
is less in contour than in memory. The dweller in 
woods 

must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, 
whose feet have traversed the fields that look so grey from his 
windows ; recall whose creaking ploughs have turned these 
sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that 
form a crest on the opposite hill, whose horses and hounds 
have torn through that underwood ; what birds affect that par- 
ticular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, 
revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, 
the mansions, the street, or on the green. 

In other words, Nature is only seen aright through 
man, and man is interpreted through Nature. 

Next to the spirit of Nature-worship in Hardy, we 
may rank the spirit of austerity. One of the com- 
monest mistakes about Hardy is that he is the 
deliberate exponent of the coarser passions, with the 
implication of licentiousness in thought and temper. 
The mistake arises from a total misunderstanding of 
Hardy's attitude toward life. His attitude is really 
that of the moralist and satirist, of the pagan rather 
than the Christian type. He sees no reason why the 
plain facts of life should not be plainly reported, and 
he reports them with uncompromising sincerity. The 
worst that can be charged against him is defect of 
delicacy, a certain bluntness of feeling which betrays 
him into errors of taste. It offends us to find woman 
spoken of as the female animal. There is, in " Jude 
the Obscure," one incident in the first meeting of Jude 
and Arabella which is unpardonable in its coarseness. 
But is it not a fair question whether this defect of 
delicacy is not the result of environment rather than 



224 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of temperament? Country folk, who are brought into 
daily close contact with animal life, have usually a very 
blunt way of describing gross facts which the more 
reticent social spirit of towns conceals. The fact 
exists ; it is well known to everybody ; what is gained 
by treating it as non-existent? Reuben, the tranter, 
in " Under the Greenwood Tree," says, 

" Well, now, that coarseness that's so upsetting to Ann's 
feelings is to my mind a recommendation; for it do always 
prove a story to be true." 

The real country-dweller is apt to assume that all that 
is true comes within the scope of discussion, and hence 
he is unaware of coarseness, which to a more fastidious 
mind is a cause of blushes. But who would assume 
that the townsman is .more virtuous than the farmer, 
because he employs euphemisms where the farmer 
would use blunt speech? The reverse is often the 
case ; the townsman's prudishness becoming a form of 
vice, and the countryman's bluntness being significant 
of a certain masculine sanity of nature. 

Hardy, by birth, habit, associates and long residence, 
belongs to the country. He uses a country frankness 
in describing the facts of life, a kind of pagan freedom. 
But the real student of country life knows perfectly 
well that in spite of these frank habits of speech the 
character of the countryman has much more austerity 
than that of the townsman. He is knit together by 
firm unyielding fibre ; his moral judgments are apt to 
be harsh ; if he be a pagan, he has also a certain pagan 
hardness as the substratum of his character. And 
Hardy entirely conforms to this type. His faults of 
taste are the faults of an over-masculine tempera- 



THOMAS HARDY 225 

ment. His bluntness is the bluntness of strength. At 
the root of his character is the countryman's austerity, 
the hard-fibred masculine temperament, unrefined by 
the use and habit of towns, and incapable of euphem- 
ism. Nature is coarse, and he who lives close to 
Nature insensibly acquires, together with the strength 
he draws from her primal bosom, something of her 
unembarrassed contemplation of things which artificial 
civilisations are in a hurry to conceal or forget. 

These things belong, however, in the main, to the 
domain of morals ; and to be exact, to morals in their 
relation to social sentiment. The austerity of Hardy 
is an intellectual rather than a moral quality. His 
mind is one of the Lucretian order, grave, sad, som- 
bre, and dominated by an overwhelming sense of law. 
His austerity is the Lucretian austerity of a peculiarly 
solemn genius, brooding over life rather than im- 
mersed in it, detached, separate, and viewing men and 
women with a kind of scornful commiseration. He 
and joy stand very far apart, in spite of his many 
moments of delightful humour. He is overweighted 
with the burden of the world. His lips smile, but in 
their curve lurks perpetual irony. His eyes have the 
prophet's severity ; he is as one who looks through the 
dim veil of life to those pitiless forces which control 
and create it. Let the reader thoroughly acquainted 
with the writings of Hardy call to mind the groups 
of people in his books ; the bowed peasants, toiling 
beneath grey skies, the relentless developments of fate 
that overtake them, the hard silent heroisms they dis- 
play, their acquiescence in calamity as a thing inevit- 
able, their rigid tearless endurance of the blows of 
circumstance, and he will begin to realise how much 



226 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the spirit of austerity governs Hardy in all his crea- 
tions. There is the clang of a pitiless mechanism in 
all, as there is in the great poem of Lucretius. He is 
without suavity, he stands apart upon an icy peak, 
watching with sombre eyes the insignificant struggles 
of a lower world, at once intent, ironically sympathetic, 
but, like Nature, implacable. There is no other novel- 
ist who stands so aloof from life; there is none with 
the same hardness of mental grain, none who more 
than distantly resembles him in the quality of intel- 
lectual austerity. 

One fruit of this austerity is the air of dignity which 
is patent in all Hardy's writings. His mind is of such 
gravity that it cannot condescend to trivial issues ; it 
moves constantly among the large and deep things of 
life. It has been truly said by Mr. Lionel Johnson 
that the " dignity of his work comes 'from his occupa- 
tion with dignified natures " ; for although the men and 
women he depicts belong to the simplest social order, 
they are all stamped with Nature's own dignity. They, 
like their creator, know nothing of the lighter emo- 
tions. Their love, their hatred, their pride are terrible 
forces, working out insatiable tragedies. They possess 
the dignity of all large and simple natures. Their 
emotions are strong and deep ; they have in them 
something akin to the resistless flow of tides, the steady 
culmination of seasons, the sweep of stars upon a pre- 
determined curve of space. Gabriel Oak and Michael 
Henchard are excellent examples of this quality. Each 
is no more than a plain labourer, but in the stoical 
endurance of the one, and the tremendous passions of 
the other, we are transported into the atmosphere of 
Greek tragedy. They belong to the old pagan world; 



THOMAS HARDY 227 

they have a fortitude, a force, a sombre dignity, which 
we instinctively feel is characteristic of a world far 
older than the Christian era. Shakespeare might have 
found a place for them in his dramas ; no other mind 
since Shakespeare's has been capable of conceiving 
them. 

From the intellectual austerity of Hardy is derived 
that powerful logic which governs all his creative 
work. It is the logic of events, infinitely lucid, in- 
finitely pitiless, never swerving by a hair's breadth 
from its appointed sequences. There is a mathemat- 
ical quality in Hardy's art ; not in vain was his early 
life devoted to architectural studies. He builds his 
story as he would build a house ; the strain of every 
part is calculated, every stone has its place, every 
crumb of mortar bears its part. The common fault of 
inexperienced novelists, as of inexperienced architects, 
is imperfect calculation. Those who have had to ex- 
amine a number of architectural plans will know how 
often it happens that in what seems an admirable 
design glaring deficiencies exist ; a staircase is left out, 
no provision is made for the lighting of a passage, or 
the roof is pitched so low that the upper rooms are 
uninhabitable. A judicial verdict on such designs 
would be that the aesthetic sense has been gratified at 
the expense of the mathematical ; and the same verdict 
would apply to many novels in which the art of appor- 
tioning cause to effect is conspicuously absent. But in 
Hardy's novels the broad sweep of design is always 
based upon an almost meticulous accuracy of detail. 
He forgets nothing. From the moment when the story 
is sufficiently advanced for us to grasp the nature of 
its problem, we can forecast the issue. We know that 



228 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

neither sentiment nor pity will turn him aside from 
the path dictated by a hard rationality. The stars in 
vain fight in their courses, and the sun is in vain com- 
manded to stand still ; things being as they are, the re- 
sults will be as they must be. And, to indulge once 
more in architectural metaphor, each part is of equal 
value in the equilibrium of the whole. Slight inci- 
dents, which we barely notice at the time, reappear 
later as controlling forces of destiny. Seeds of action, 
dropped carelessly, startle us with sudden explosions 
of life. The colour of a thread of hair introduces us 
to the gallows. A hot glance of passion ruins a life. 
The story, when it begins to move, moves with an 
increasing momentum to an ineluctable goal. The 
logic of events tramples its way over human hearts to 
its axiomatic close, knowing no respite, and is proof 
against the excited prayer or appeal of all protesting 
sentiment. 

No quality in Hardy's work is so marked as this, 
and none is so impressive. Many writers have great 
gifts of imagination, but little gift of invention ; in 
Hardy the gifts are in equipoise. It would be equally 
true to say that he produces his effects by largeness 
of design, and by minute finish of particulars. When 
he described " Under the Greenwood Tree " as a piece 
of painting in the Dutch manner, he rightly laid stress 
on his habit of minute perfection. It is the manner of 
Gerald Dow and Van Huysum, each of whom excels 
in the elaboration of detail. The picture is built up by 
multitudes of slight touches, by the use of the finest 
brush ; infinite care being taken to produce the dew- 
drop on a cabbage-leaf, the bloom upon a peach, the 
brilliant sheen upon a copper pot or an insect's wing. 



THOMAS HARDY 229 

But Hardy did less than justice to himself in insisting 
on this elaboration of detail as the chief feature of his 
art. There is something more, a breadth of design, a 
magnificence of detail, as though to the delicacy of 
Gerald Dow's art there were added the poetic grandeur 
of Rembrandt. The various tavern scenes, and the 
Mayor's dinner, and the dancing in the booth, in the 
" The Mayor of Casterbridge," are entirely in the spirit 
of Dow's or Ostade's art ; but it is a totally different 
spirit which meets us in the wild heath where Hen- 
chard seeks a shelter for his mortal agony. It is the 
brush of Rembrandt that is at work here. Yet the 
final grandeur is the logical climax of converging 
trivalities. In each separate incident there is an ele- 
ment which proves necessary in the completion of the 
whole. When we close one of Hardy's greatest books 
the deepest impression is always of something fated 
and inevitable in the sequence of event, and this im- 
pression rests equally upon his skill in episode and his 
power of climax, his genius in invention and his genius 
for imagination, the coherence of his logic, and his 
power of penetrating vision. He is, in effect, a man of 
science, turned dramatist, a mathematician dealing 
with dramatic and poetic material. 

From a mind so constituted we might have expected 
a variety of moral qualities, such as calmness, tem- 
perance, sanity ; how comes it, then, that the logic of 
Hardy constantly expresses itself in a passionate mel- 
ancholy? The most probable answer is that he is too 
narrowly logical to see life in its full perspective. He 
reasons on too slender premises. Determined to set 
down precisely what he sees in life and no more, he 
is incapable of looking beyond life. The future has no 



230 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

existence for him. His view of life is microscopic 
rather than astronomic. His eye is fixed upon a bril- 
liantly lit lens, beneath which the contortions of the 
pitiably futile creature known as man are faithfully 
exhibited ; it does not occur to him that the same 
creature has authentic relations with infinity. It is 
difficult to recall any leading figure in Hardy's books 
who sees life in large perspective, who feels that 
romance of the infinite which manifests itself in gen- 
uine religious emotion. Not one looks beyond the 
earth, not one is consoled by any thought of future 
opportunities and vindications. And hence, in spite 
of the great note of tragedy which is heard ever and 
again, Hardy makes us feel that life is a little thing, 
appointed to derision and disaster, the contortions of 
a " mollusc on a leaf," the flight of a gnat in a sun- 
beam. Some sense of the gravity and splendour of 
human life is necessary to that self-reverence which is 
the true source of all cheerful or hopeful views of life. 
But Hardy sees no element of gravity or splendour in 
human life; it is sordid, cruel, mean, and therefore he 
cannot regard it with cheerfulness. He is, to use his 
own phrase, " unreconciled to life," and his disbelief 
in life — in its vital good, its moral base, its hidden 
goal, its possibilities of sublimity or indefinite evolu- 
tion — produces in him a constant temper of scornful 
anger deepening into bitterest melancholy. 

It is by no means the worst thing that can happen 
to a man that he should be " unreconciled to life," for 
there is a species of divine discontent from which all 
progress springs. But Hardy's lack of reconciliation 
to life is purely negative. He does not resent her 
discord only to seek some possible rhythm, he does 



THOMAS HARDY 231 

not realise her gloom only to be " stung with hunger 
for full light." He does not so much as suggest a 
solution of the human problem. He is resolved to live 
without one, as a Stoic to whom nothing greatly mat- 
ters, and yet the very bitterness of his reflections 
makes us feel how much it matters. He is too angry 
not to care ; the very violence of his aversion to life is 
significant of acute feeling. Who will show us any 
good? is his constant cry. Most people would see 
some good in a home full of children, but even that 
spectacle excites Hardy's anger. 

If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into 
difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, 
thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches 
compelled to sail with them — six helpless little creatures, who 
had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, 
much less if they wished it on such hard conditions as were 
involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some 
people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy 
is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his 
verse is pure and breezy, gets his authority for speaking of 
" Nature's holy plan." 

The Durbeyfield children are plainly doomed to 
destruction by what he takes pains to inform us is " an 
unsympathetic First Cause." It is in the same spirit 
that the last sentence of the great tragedy of " Tess " 
is written : 

Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals [an 
^Lschylean phrase] had ended his sport with Tess. 

Many similar passages might be quoted, all coloured 
with the same melancholy. No doubt it is in part a 



232 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

heritage of temperament. Possibly also it may be 
traced in some degree to the influence of solitude on 
a sensitive mind, for melancholy is a quite common 
feature of rural life. But in the main its source is that 
peculiarly narrow logic of the scientific mind without 
faith, which sees life microscopically rather than 
astronomically. The thread of life upon the lens is 
insignificant enough till we see it as part of the uni- 
versal life; the drop of water is contemptible till we 
see it lifted into clouds, and woven into rainbows. But 
the ultimate of life is what Hardy never sees. The 
highest vision he has is of an " Unfulfilled Intention," 
from which nothing can be hoped, and which is there- 
fore but an elaborate mockery on the part of the 
President of the Immortals. 

Apart from reasons clearly discernible in the nature 
of his teaching, one can only guess at causes of 
melancholy which are part of the author's own person- 
ality ; but it seems probable that the solitude of country 
life, to which reference has been made, may rank with 
the major causes. Writers on country life have much 
to say about its joys, but they rarely penetrate the 
secret of its melancholy. Nor is it easy to analyse it. 
It owes something to the solemnity of the earth itself, 
something to the sense of relentless forces always at 
work behind the veil of things, yet more to the habit 
of self-introspection, the turning over and over in the 
mind of a few thoughts, the harping on the same 
string. The man who leads a broad, busy, adventurous 
life is rarely given to pessimism. In moving freely 
about the world, he gets a sense of the variety of the 
forces at work. He does not trouble himself to frame 
a theory of life, because he finds so much to contradict 



THOMAS HARDY 233 

all theories, the good and the bad alike. Nor does he 
dwell overmuch on the grim and awful aspects of 
life. His thought flows nimbly ; his interest in new 
objects is constantly excited ; there is no time for the 
blood to stagnate into the black poisonous clot which 
corrupts the heart. But with the man of reflective 
mind, living in solitude, the process is reversed. The 
thought is continually turned in upon itself, and grad- 
ually becomes morbid. Things come to be seen out of 
proportion, and the real perspective of life is lost. 
One suspects that the morbid strain in Hardy's genius 
is the product of causes such as these. By living the 
life of a solitary he has learned to write with extraor- 
dinary mastery of that corner of the world which 
he knows ; but it is at the sacrifice of much that might 
have made him a happier man, and possibly a more 
efficient artist. Shakespeare owed much more to Lon- 
don than to Stratford ; possibly Hardy would have 
depicted life with a broader synthesis had he known 
the city as well as he knows the hamlet and the wood- 
land. 

And yet, mixed with all Hardy's melancholy, there 
is one of the finest gifts of humour ever possessed by 
an English novelist. If in anything* Hardy does betray 
authentic kinship with Shakespeare, it is in this gift of 
humour. His peasants often seem to have stepped 
direct out of Shakespearean comedy. Joseph Poor- 
grass is as great a humorous creation as Bottom or 
Justice Shallow. He belongs, indeed, to the same 
England, the archaic racy England of Shakespearean 
comedy, fruitful in types of character, over which the 
steam-roller of advanced civilisation has not passed. 

Hardy's peasants have the delightful, unconscious 



2M MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

grotesqueness of pure comedy. They have the whims 
and oddities of children who have not attained that 
stage of enlightenment when self-consciousness pro- 
duces self-distrust and reticence. They are full of 
quaint conceits, and their very language has a sort of 
stilted solemnity which is irresistibly comic, just as 
the talk of children is often comic by the employment 
of words chosen for their sound rather than their 
sense. They are unconsciously and delightfully pro- 
fane. " Poor Charlotte," says Coggan ; " I wonder if 
she had the good fortune to get into heaven when a' 
died. But a' was never much in luck's way, and 
perhaps a' went downwards after all, poor soul." It 
is one of the reproaches of Farmer Everdene's kitchen 
that not a single damn was allowed : " No, not a poor 
bare one, even at the most cheerful moment when all 
was blindest, though the good old word of sin thrown 
in here and there at such times is a great relief to a 
merry soul." Concerning which, the maltster replies 
in grave reprehension, as one who states a moral fact, 
" Nater requires her swearing at regular times, or 
she's not herself; and unholy exclamations is a neces- 
sity of life." Joseph Poorgrass' apology for drunken- 
ness is worthy of Pecksniff — he only suffers " from 
a multiplying eye." " A multiplying eye is a very bad 
thing," says Mark Clark. " It always comes on when 
I have been in a public-house a little time," says 
Joseph Poorgrass meekly. " Yes, I see two of every 
sort, as if I were some holy man, living in the times 
of King Noah and entering into the ark . . . 
y-y-y-yes," he added, becoming much afflicted by the 
picture of himself as a person thrown away, and shed- 
ding tears, " I feel too good for England ; I ought to 



THOMAS HARDY 235 

have lived in Genesis by rights, like the other men of 
sacrifice, and then I shouldn't have b-b-been called a 
d-d-drunkard in such a way." If Dr. Barrow's famous 
definition of humour, that " it lurketh under an odd 
similitude, in a plausible reconciling of contradictions, 
or in acute nonsense," be correct, there are few more 
triumphant illustrations of humour than the speeches 
of Joseph Poorgrass. 

It is characteristic of all these Wessex peasants that 
they are much concerned with religion. They are 
frequently engaged in the attempt to unravel the 
mysteries of life, and they are never more humorous 
than when so employed, because their reasoning has 
that delightful element of topsy-turvy logic which is 
so charming in childhood. Perhaps this is the secret 
of their charm ; they are children, the ignorant, quaint 
children of Arcadia. They advance their views on 
the ways of Deity with all the irreverent frankness of 
children. They state with the utmost gravity, the most 
absurd propositions. Thus Mark Clark seriously ar- 
gues that the power of taking a sufficient quantity of 
drink is " a talent of the Lord mercifully bestowed 
upon us, and we ought not to neglect it." Coggan's 
loyalty to the Established Church is based upon the 
comfortable assurance that " a man can belong to the 
Church and bide in his cheerful old inn, and never 
trouble or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But 
to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in all winds 
and weathers, and make yerself as frantic as a skit. 
Not but what chapel-members be clever chaps enough 
in their way. They can lift up beautiful prayers out 
of their own heads, all about their families and ship- 
wrecks in the newspapers." 



236 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

" They can, they can," says Mark Clark, with cor- 
roborative feeling, " but we Churchmen, you see, must 
have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it all, we should 
no more know what to say to a great gaffer like the 
Lord than babes unborn." The language of all these 
worthies is full of Scripture allusions, almost always 
wrongly used. When Joseph Poorgrass explains to 
Cain Ball the nature of an oath, he informs him that 
' 'Tis a horrible testament mind ye, which you say and 
seal with your bloodstone, and the prophet Matthew 
tells us that on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind 
him to powder." Even Tess, in spite of her Board 
School education, has visions of centurions still to be 
seen in the crowded places of the earth. The devil is 
euphemistically described as " the dark man," or " the 
horrid man in the smoking house." Odd quotations 
from Church collects mingle with snatches of monkish 
lore, and still more ancient pagan superstitions. And, 
underlying all this quaint jumble of ideas, there is a 
kind of wisdom ; touches of shrewd observation, and 
the plain man's philosophy based on hard experience. 
With little knowledge, few pleasures, and the narrow- 
est outlook upon life, Hardy's peasants nevertheless 
speak as wise men, not as fools. 

Hardy has done nothing so well as this rendering of 
peasant humour. He understands the Wessex peasant 
thoroughly, and has rendered him completely. It is 
noticeable that his gift of humour confines itself almost 
entirely to the Wessex peasant ; there is not a trace of 
humour among the higher social types he depicts. 
There is no laughter on the lips of Clym Yeobright, or 
Grace Melbury, or Angel Clare ; they are all more or 
less conscious of the complexity of life. It would seem 



THOMAS HARDY 237 

that education is destructive of humour; in the degree 
that knowledge widens, the capacity for quaint conceit 
is lost. Hardy had the good fortune to know the 
countryside before education had drilled its inhabitants 
into uniformity. He has caught the last fugitive 
gleams of a humour that will visit it no more. When 
we speak of his peasants as Shakespearean, we use an 
intrinsically right phase, for the peasants of Hardy's 
romances do literally belong to a world that has altered 
scarcely at all since Shakespeare's day. They use the 
same racy words which were familiar when Elizabeth 
was queen, they express themselves with the same 
frankness, innocence, and archaic simplicity. And 
something of the spirit of that Merrie England of 
Elizabeth yet lingers in them, a spirit of pagan joy- 
ousness that flies before the advance of railroads, 
school-boards, and a popular press. 

Of Hardy as a stylist something has already been 
said. He has not the delicate and discriminating ear 
of the supreme artist. Such an artist would never 
have described Wordsworth's poetry as " breezy," or 
have used such a phrase as " mounting a humid 
steed." In most of Hardy's writing there is also a 
certain laboured stiffness. He has no natural elo- 
quence of language ; one can imagine him almost as 
surprised as his reader when a really fine phrase 
flashes from his pen. He is apt to be pedantic, 
especially in his constant references to art. These are 
so frequent that without a tolerably competent knowl- 
edge of Dutch and Italian pictures many of his 
allusions will be meaningless to his readers ; and in 
purely rural drama it is irritating, in any case, to be 
distracted by such allusions. 



238 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

The same criticism applies to his frequent intro- 
duction of scientific references. A capital instance 
of this intrusion of science to the detriment of a story- 
occurs in " A Pair of Blue Eyes." The finest scene 
in the entire book is the adventure of Knight and 
Elfrida on the cliff, when Knight's life is in peril; 
but it is much injured in effect by the geological re- 
flections of Knight. The passage in which these 
reflections are expressed is in itself nobly written. 

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at 
one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and 
all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, 
clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and 
attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like 
phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. . . . Behind them 
stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine 
forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of 
monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon — all, for 
the moment, in juxtaposition. Farther back, and overlapped 
by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures 
as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister 
crocodilean outlines — alligators, and other uncouth shapes, cul- 
minating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. . . . These 
images passed before Knight's inner eye in less than half a 
minute, and he was again considering the actual present. Was 
he to die? He dared not move an inch. 

One would like to be sure that all these images did 
pass before Knight's mental eye in half a minute, but 
it seems improbable. A man fighting for his life on 
a crumbling cliff-face has other things to think of 
than geology. But even if a man of Knight's scientific 
mind might be conceived as indulging in these re- 
flections, two pages of writing were not necessary for 
their record. The story pauses for a lecture on 



THOMAS HARDY 239 

geology, and, fine as the lecture is, yet it leaves an 
unpleasant sense of pedantry. This habit of pedantry 
is Hardy's worst fault. But in the main his style is 
eminently lucid. If he lacks the finest kind of literary 
discrimination, he is nevertheless the master of a 
singularly compact and nervous style ; a trifle too 
laboured it may be, not gracious nor eloquent, but 
grave, masculine, and usually impressive in its sin- 
cerity. 

Opinion will be divided on the relative values of 
Hardy's books ; but it may be confidently claimed that 
few authors who have written so much have written 
so little that is not memorable. " The Pursuit of the 
Well-Beloved " is his only entire failure, and there 
are parts of " Jude the Obscure " which suggest the 
decadence of genius. " The Trumpet-Major," " The 
Hand of Ethelberta," and " Desperate Remedies " are 
also books that fall below the first rank. But we have 
left at least five books which deserve to rank with the 
highest products of English fiction, viz., " The Return 
of the Native," " The Woodlanders," " The Mayor of 
Casterbridge," " Far from the Madding Crowd," and 
" Tess of the D'Urbervilles " ; and not far behind these 
come " Under the Greenwood Tree," with its inimi- 
table country charm, and " A Pair of Blue Eyes," 
with its pathetic note of tragedy. In these five 
greater books assuredly a rare genius is enshrined. 
They bear that severest test of fiction, the possibility 
of constant re-perusal, and they bear it triumphantly. 
We can as little imagine these books forgotten in any 
subsequent generation as the greater works of Jane 
Austen, Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray. It would in- 
deed be difficult to name any books in which the art 



240 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of fiction has been carried to a higher point of per- 
fection ; they are great alike in design and execution, 
and display the fullest resources of a creative art. 
Upon these books the fame of Hardy will rest, as upon 
an impregnable foundation. Men may adopt new 
philosophies, and attain to a wider synthesis of life, 
which may do something to discredit Hardy's teach- 
ing ; but as long as the mind of man is capable of being 
moved by the note of pure tragedy, as long as pastoral 
drama has a charm and humour a fascination, as long 
as the mental eye rests with delight on strong and 
simple types of character, as long as enough sincerity 
remains in the reader to prefer the plain realism of life 
to its sentimental counterfeits, so long will the work 
of Thomas Hardy live. And unless the future bring 
with it some irretrievable decay of taste, some general 
decadence of literary instinct, in which the gods of 
gold shall be overthrown to make room for the gods 
of clay, this means that Hardy's fame will be a pro- 
longed and imperishable fame. 



XVII 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, bom in Edinburgh, No- 
vember 13th, 1850. Published "An Inland Voyage," 1878; 
"Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes," 1879; "Prince 
Otto," 1885; "The Strange Case of Dr. Jckyll and Mr. Hyde," 
1886; "Kidnapped," 1886; "The Master of Ballantrce," 1889; 
" The Wrecker," 1892; " Catriona," 1893; " The Ebb-Tide," 
1894; " Weir of Henniston," 1896. Died in Samoa, Decem- 
ber 3rd, 1894. 

A AIONG the writers of later fiction Robert Louis 
AA Stevenson occupies a place apart, not only by 
-*~ -^the nature of his work, but by virtue of a fas- 
cinating and unique personality. It was his supreme 
fortune to be treated as a classic before his death, a 
fate that has happened to few, and to scarcely any one 
whose period of toil was so brief as his. Yet, as a 
novelist, it can hardly be allowed that he ranks with 
the greatest. His most popular stories, " Treasure 
Island," " Kidnapped," and " Catriona," are written 
with immense vivacity, but no one would think of 
putting them in the same category with the greatest 
works of Cervantes or Balzac, of Thackeray or Scott. 
He himself would have been the first to repudiate 
such a claim. He is entirely frank in confessing that 
he does not wield an easy pen. He never thinks of 
the immense fecundity of invention, and the careless, 
masterly ease of Scott without despair. He says, in 
speaking of Scott, " I cannot compete with that — what 

241 



242 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out ' Guy 
Mannering ' in three weeks. What a pull of work ! 
Heavens, what thews and sinews ! And here am I, 
my head spinning with having re-written seven not 
very difficult pages, and not very good when done." 
In a darker mood he writes, " I think ' David Balfour ' 
a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing 
to occupy the leisure of a busy man ; but for the 
flower of a man's life it seems to me inadequate. 
Small is the age ; it is a small age, and I am of it." 
What, then, is the secret of the unique fascination 
which Stevenson exercises over his contemporaries? 
It lies in personality, charm, and style. It is perfectly 
true that he cannot write with the supreme ease of 
Scott, whose work was a pastime rather than a labour ; 
but he has the rarer art which Scott had not, of in- 
fusing into all his work an element of something inti- 
mate and spiritual, which all who are sympathetic to 
him must feel, and find delightful. 

There are many writers capable of producing admir- 
able and even memorable books, who, nevertheless, 
fail to quicken in us any slightest ripple of interest 
concerning themselves. There are other writers whose 
most careless page is steeped in so keen a personal ele- 
ment that our admiration for their work is from the 
first curiously intermingled with affection for them- 
selves. It is to the latter class that Stevenson belongs. 
He has the secret of charm. He admits us to the inti- 
macies of his soul. He explains with the alluring 
frankness of a child his motives, recapitulates his er- 
rors, registers his fluctuations of health, of feeling, of 
opinion, discloses his methods of thought or labour, 
and altogether interests us in the problem of himself 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 243 

quite as much as in the story he tells or the plot he 
weaves. He is a bland and genial egotist, but without 
a trace of vanity ; it is the egotism of a child. We 
read his books with the curious sense of a haunting 
presence, as of some light-footed Ariel; or, in more 
solemn moments, of a spiritual form hovering near us. 
There is a body terrestrial and a body celestial ; the 
celestial body floats very near us in the limpid atmos- 
phere of Stevenson's best work. It is given to few 
authors to produce this effect. We feel it in the work 
of Montaigne, of Ruskin, of Charles Lamb, and it is 
an effect which only genius can produce. Perhaps 
we can best measure by such a test the long-debated 
differentiation of talent and genius ; the man of talent 
interests us in his work, the man of genius makes his 
work the medium through which we are interested in 
himself. 

Stevenson has another element of genius which is 
equally rare; the gift of an inimitable style. Perhaps 
one should hardly speak of it as a gift, since he himself 
has taken pains to inform us by what infinite labour it 
was attained. He has stated that " elbow grease " is 
the secret of his success. From earliest boyhood he 
admits the tendency to write, but with him it was never 
a casual indulgence, nor was the achievement of his 
style a fortunate discovery. In those old Edinburgh 
student days which he has so perfectly depicted, he 
was to the academic eye a mere idler, attending as 
few classes as possible, and wholly without thirst for 
academic honour. When he presented himself for a 
certificate in the engineering class, Professor Flem- 
ing Jenkin, whose life he was afterwards to write, 
said, " It is quite useless for you to come, Mr. Steven- 



244 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

son. There may be doubtful cases ; there is no doubt 
about yours. You have simply not attended my 
class." He indulges in a sly thrust at the model stu- 
dent when he says, " Most boys pay so dear for their 
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their 
locker, and begin the world bankrupt." It would be 
interesting to know what the model student thought 
of him. Certainly in those days few persons, perhaps 
none, augured distinction for this long, lean, dreamy- 
eyed youth, whose chief joy was in silent rambles 
on the Pentlands, and whose inhuman carelessness of 
academic reputation was only equalled by his barbarian 
pleasure in free winds and solitude. But he had a 
university of his own, and was graduating after his 
own fashion. This university was provided by " a 
nameless trickle that springs in the green bosom of 
Allermuir, and is fed from Holkerside with a peren- 
nial teacupful, and threads the moss under Shearer's 
Knowe, and makes one pool there overhung by a rock, 
where I loved to sit and make bad verses." It was 
there he ceaselessly experimented in the art of word- 
weaving. He began to see that words were something 
more than the mere counters of speech ; they had roots, 
and bloom, colour and fragrance; they were histories 
and biographies ; they embalmed the thoughts of dead 
generations, and had associations which linked them 
with an immeasurable past ; they had also the secret of 
music in them, and were capable of endless modulation 
and harmony under the touch of a deft hand, and by 
the regulation of a quick ear. It is a lesson which 
every great stylist has to learn, but few have ever gone 
about it with such systematic patience. In one pocket 
the boy carried the book he was reading, in the 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 245 

other the book which contained his experiments in 
writing ; and in no class-room of the University of 
Edinburgh was there more indefatigable labour going 
on than beside this " nameless trickle " of the Pent- 
lands, in this green university of the hills. 

This sense of the richness of words is one of the 
most striking qualities in all Stevenson's writings. Of 
all the constant and delightful surprises of his pages, 
cadence is the chief : the unexpected harmony which 
is obtained by the use of some sonorous and resonant 
word. We may open his books at random, and be 
sure that this music will greet us. Here, for example, 
are half-a-dozen phrases, taken at hazard as the book 
happens to fall open: 

The high canorous note of the north-easter on days when 
the very houses seem to stiffen with cold. 

The song of hurrying rivers. 

The green-gold air of the east at evening. 

At every town the cocks were tossing their notes into the 
golden air. 

The sad immunities of death. 

The great conflagrant sun, tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimi- 
cal to life. 

The fountains of the Trade were empty. Where it had run 
but yesterday, and for weeks before, a roaring blue river, 
charioting clouds, silence now reigned, and the whole height 
of the atmosphere stood balanced. 

Consider the mere sound of these phrases, the satisfy- 
ing depth of harmony that fills the ear on their rotund 
utterance. In his essay on " The English Admirals," 
Stevenson says characteristically that Cloudesley 
Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables ; 
and in all that he has written he has the liveliest ear 



246 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

for the charm of all quaint and sounding syllables. But 
it must be noted that Stevenson never chooses a word 
for its mere sound, but for its truth and fitness. His 
boyish experiments taught him, above all things, the 
art of observation ; they were not the bookish pastimes 
of a precocious boy in a library, but of a youth sitting 
on a green hillside, and beneath a sky full of travelling 
clouds, who found in language the medium of inter- 
pretation that the painter finds in line and colour. It 
is scarcely possible to describe the high piping note of 
the north-easter by a better word than " canorous," or 
the joyous morning note of the cock by a truer phrase 
than " tossed into the golden air." It is not until we 
attempt to alter these phrases, to transpose or amend 
them, that we discover how perfect they are. And we 
perceive at the same time by what labour they have 
been forged, by what close attention to the niceties of 
sound, to the truth of nature, to the demands of art. 
Of no writer of our day is the saying truer that his is 
the art which conceals art, the ease and flexibility 
which are the disguises of eternal labour. 

But it is obvious that the work of a novelist cannot 
be judged by any verbal felicities of expression, how- 
ever rare. The main work of a novelist is to depict 
human life, and to disclose the secrecies of human 
character. Stevenson himself was perfectly aware of 
this. He claimed to be a psychologist or nothing. 
Can we find in his work the creative instinct, the 
power of vivid and true characterisation which gives 
vitality to the puppets of his pen? Few writers have 
less cause to shrink from such a test. We may place 
to his credit such vital figures as John Silver, the sea- 
cook in " Treasure Island." Alan Breck in " Kid- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 247 

napped," Captain Nares in " The Wrecker." In 
Silver and Captain Nares there is an almost brutal 
vivacity of life. We see them in their habit as they 
lived, we recognise them in every turn of expression, 
idiomatic of their own minds. Nor is this quite all. 
The portrait painter can produce the external traits 
of character, and even suggest the internal essence, 
but it needs the psychologist to analyse the soul. 
Stevenson judged himself aright when he claimed 
to be a psychologist, or nothing. There is a 
subtlety of insight in his presentation of character 
which is rare even in the greatest novelist. It goes 
to the very roots of motive, it touches the secret coils 
of conduct, it exhibits men not as they appear to the 
world, but as they appear to themselves and their 
Maker. 

We have a palmary example of this power in Robert 
Herrick, in the " Ebb-Tide." Herrick belongs to a 
class which arouses all the psychologist's instinct in 
Stevenson. Here is a man who has failed in life not 
through vice, but weakness. A fatal incompetence, 
and an incapacity of fixed aim and deliberate effort, 
have brought him at last to be the comrade of Huish, 
the cockney cad, and Davis, the broken-down drunken 
sea captain on the beach of Papeete. The three men, 
made comrades by misfortune, sail away upon a stolen 
ship. Self-contempt eats the soul of Robert Herrick 
throughout that tragic voyage, but he submits to his 
environment. He sees his duty, but cannot do it. 
The ship comes at last to a solitary island, and there 
Herrick's fate touches its grim climax. Attwater, the 
owner of the island, reads his character when he asks 
him what the " puppy is doing between two wolves." 



248 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

In the bitterness of his shame Herrick sees no escape 
but suicide, and then follows an analysis of the 
thoughts and emotions of the despairing man, which 
it would be difficult to parallel in modern literature. 
Herrick slips silently at midnight into the water of the 
lagoon, resolved on death. 

A very bright planet shone before him, and drew a trenchant 
wake along the water. He took that for his line and followed 
it. That was the last earthly thing that he should look upon; 
that radiant speck, which he had soon magnified into a City 
of Laputa, along whose terraces there walked men and women 
of awful and benignant features, who viewed him with distant 
commiseration. 

From these flights of fancy he was aroused by the growing 
coldness of the water. Why should he delay? Here, where 
he was now, let him seek the ineffable refuge, let him lie down 
with all races and generations of men in the house of sleep. 
It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming; there was 
no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he? And he 
could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of 
an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, cling- 
ing to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, 
sinew by sinew ; something that was at once he and not he — 
at once within and without him ; the shutting of some minia- 
ture valve within the brain, which a single manly thought 
would suffice to open — and the grasp of an external fate in- 
eluctable as gravity. To any man there may come at times a 
consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of 
his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his ; that his mind 
rebels ; that another girds him and carries him whither he 
would not. It came now to Herrick with the authority of a 
revelation. There was no escape possible. The open door 
was closed in his recreant face. He must go back into the 
world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger 
on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace, 
until a cold, a blow, a merciful chance ball, or the more merci- 
ful hangman, should dismiss him from his infamy. There 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 249 

were men who could commit suicide; there were men who 
could not; and he was one who could not. 

His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself. 

Such is the picture of Herrick, Oxford graduate, 
beach-comber, comrade of thieves, without faith, with- 
out resolution, whose final confession is — " I am 
broken crockery ; I am a burst drum ; the whole of my 
life is gone to water; I have nothing left that I be- 
lieve in, except my living horror of myself," — and it 
is something more than a character that is presented 
to us by the subtle art of Stevenson : it is the exhibition 
of a soul in torture. 

Another characteristic of Stephenson's art is the 
poetic sense of nature which it everywhere displays. 
This is, perhaps, its most delightful quality. It ap- 
pears in his first book, when he describes his outdoor 
life as donkey-driver in the Cevennes ; it appears in his 
last, where he paints with a full brush the rugged 
scenery of Scotland, whose fascination survived 
through all his years of exile. Like the French doc- 
tor of one of his stories, he was a connoisseur in sun- 
rises. Could he have chosen, he would have lived 
always in the fields, where, as he says, " God keeps an 
open house." One of his most charming pictures is of 
his outdoor sleep among the woods — the blue dark- 
ness lying along the glade when he slumbered, his 
sleep soothed by the " indescribable quiet talk of the 
runnel over the stones," and the dawn waking him to 
the moment. And in spite of all the maladies that 
laid him by the heels, Stevenson remained all his life 
a hater of houses, a lover of open spaces, a gypsy at 
heart, who submitted with intense reluctance to the 
smug comfort of a life beneath roofs. 



250 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Sunrise has often been painted, but rarely with more 
truth and charm than in this description which occurs 
in Stevenson's " Prince Otto." 

The Princess Seraphina, suddenly deprived of her 
throne by a miniature revolution, flees into the forest, 
and spends, for the first time in her life, a night under 
the naked heavens. Suddenly she becomes aware of a 
glow of transfiguration in the woods, and with joy 
catching at her voice, cries, " O, it is the dawn ! " 

Soon she had struggled to a certain hill-top, and saw far be- 
fore her the silent unfolding of the day. Out of the east it 
welled and whitened ; the darkness trembled into light ; and 
the stars were extinguished like the street lamps of a human 
city. The whiteness brightened into silver; the silver warmed 
into gold : the gold kindled into pure and living fire ; and the 
face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The 
day drew its first long breath, steady and chill : and for leagues 
around the woods sighed and shivered. And then at one 
bound the sun leaped up : and her startled eyes received day's 
first arrow, and quailed under the buffet. The day was come 
plain and garish : and up the steep and solitary eastern 
heavens the sun, victorious over his competitors, continued 
slowly and royally to mount. 

Take again, as a companion picture, the tropic day- 
break as the Farralone, the stolen ship in " The 
Ebb Tide," begins to open up the unknown island. It 
is four in the morning when the sound of breakers is 
first heard. 

The sound was continuous, like the passing of a train : no 
rise or fall could be distinguished : minute by minute the ocean 
heaved with an equal potency against the invisible isle ; and as 
time passed, and Herrick waited in vain for any vicissitude in 
the volume of that roaring, a sense of the eternal weighed 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 251 

upon his mind. To the expert eye the isle itself was to be 
inferred from a certain string of blots along the starry heaven. 
There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in 
the east : then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue 
between crimson and silver, and then coals of fire. These 
glimmered awhile on the sea-line, and seemed to brighten and 
darken, and spread out, and still the night and the stars re- 
mained undisturbed ; it was as though a spark should catch 
and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost 
incombustible wall-hanging, and the room itself is scarce 
menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole east glowed with 
gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with 
daylight. 

And then, to take one more example, executed on a 
larger scale, what description of a sea-storm can be at 
once truer and more impressive than the description of 
the gale the Nor ah Creina meets on the way to Mid- 
way Island in " The Wrecker "? 

By dinner I had fled the deck, and sat in the bench corner, 
giddy, dumb, and stupefied with terror. The frightened leaps 
of the poor No rah Creina, spanking like a stag for bare ex- 
istence, bruised me between the table and the berths. Over- 
head the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in 
one blare of mingled noises ; screaming wind, straining timber, 
lashing rope's end, pounding block, and bursting sea con- 
tributed ; and I could have thought there was at times another, 
a more piercing, a more human note that dominated all, like 
the wailing of an angel ; I could have thought I knew the 
angel's name, and that his wings were black. It seemed in- 
credible that any creature of man's art could long endure the 
barbarous mishandling of the seas, kicked as the schooner 
was from mountain side to mountain side, beaten, and blown 
upon, and wrenched in every joint and sinew, like a child 
upon the rack. . . . God bless every man that swung a 
mallet on that tiny and strong hull ! It was not for wages 
only that he laboured, but to save men's lives. 



252 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

It is in passages like these that Stevenson moves and 
holds the hearts of his readers. Nature still remains, 
in spite of cities, the open Bible, toward which God's 
creatures turn with undying interest and curiosity, and 
no writer is truly great who cannot read afresh, and 
teach us to read, the beauty of that Bible. Stevenson 
has done this. He has spoken to the poet that exists 
in every man. He has hung the common room of life 
with inimitable tapestries woven on the looms of God. 
He has brought to tired men in cities a new vision of 
the wonder of the earth. Great statesmen and great 
soldiers whose names are famous have done less to 
help mankind with all their toils, for of all boons that 
men can bring to man none is greater than to give 
vision to his eyes, and make him feel the grandeur of 
that elemental life of which he is a part. 

This sense of the elementary grandeur in human life 
is a marked feature in all Stevenson's works. It is 
this which constantly imparts dignity to episodes of 
action which in themselves are mean. There is an en- 
ergy of touch altogether Homeric in his best stories, a 
delight in human daring, and a sense of a large music 
running through human life, full of incomparable 
rhythm and noblest diapason. An instance of this is 
found in the picture he draws of Carthew, the broken 
gentleman, who recovers his hold on life by earning 
his hard wage as a navvy, working night and day 
through the Australian rains to keep the trains run- 
ning on a washed-out line. Carthew recognises " the 
answering glory of battle " in such a task. The moun- 
tain shakes and nods seaward ; the rare trains come 
creeping and signalling ; the navvies clutch at trees 
and shrubs and watch in choking silence ; and Carthew, 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 253 

sick with sleeplessness and coffee, with hands softened 
and cut to ribbons by the wet, watches too with min- 
gled fear and exultation. In this " continual instancy 
of toil," hitherto lacking in his misdirected life, he had 
found " the true cure of vital scepticism." The curt 
words of praise from the engineer's grim lips " fall 
on the ears of the discarded son like music." Toil 
and venture re-create in him the spirit of a man. And 
it is in commenting on this scene that Stevenson re- 
veals his own spirit. He declares that no man can 
know much of human life whose own career is " seden- 
tary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe." Let such 
men paint pictures or write stories if they will, but let 
them forbear judgment on man and his destiny, " for 
it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their 
own life . is an excrescence of the moment. . . . 
The elemental life of man, spent under sun and rain, 
and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce 
changed since the beginning." 

It is this mode of thought which makes Stevenson's 
stories in the right sense heroic. It is common to speak 
of the chief figure in a novel as the hero of the story; 
but in few instances is he truly heroic. Stevenson's 
heroes are heroic. They are one and all engaged in 
dramas of action. They suffer hunger, nakedness, 
thirst, peril, and in all quit themselves like men. Alan 
Breck, fleeing through the heather, holds us fasci- 
nated by his gaiety, his impudence, his resourcefulness. 
The Master of Ballantra?, black-hearted villain as he 
is, charms us by his contempt of fate. Even Huish, 
the cockney cad in " The Ebb-Tide," the most entirely 
contemptible of creatures, has the grace of courage. 
Stevenson knew well that whatever appetite may fail 



254 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

in man, his appetite for heroism remains insatiable. 
" Ingloriously safe " as his own life may be, he thrills 
to the note of peril and adventure. And hence, when 
Stevenson rehabilitated the old pirate and adventure 
story, he was doing a real service to his age, by at- 
tracting men to that spectacle of rude Homeric strug- 
gle, the taste for which no civilisation has the power 
to extirpate, or even to subdue. 

But Stevenson was a moralist too, and a moralist 
even when he wrote of pirates. Mr. Henley remarked 
this characteristic in his famous sonnet upon Steven- 
son, a sonnet which is as vivid a piece of impression- 
ism as can be found in English poetry. 

In his face, 
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
There gleams a brilliant and romantic grace. 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion, impudence, and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical. 

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, 
And something of the Shorter Catechist. 

The description sounds paradoxical, but it is per- 
fectly accurate. Beneath much that is wayward and 
bohemian in Stevenson's temperament there runs the 
hard strata of the Shorter Catechist, as beneath the 
soft loam there may often be found the wedge of rock 
which turns the sharpest weapon. It was the heritage 
of his Scotch birth and training. The Scot can rarely 
escape the pressure of those profound and serious 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 255 

thoughts which constitute religion, and Stevenson car- 
ried religion in his very bones and marrow. He makes 
no effort to conceal the fact. He speaks of his own 
religious experiences with the fervour of a St. Augus- 
tine or a Wesley. He tells us that his own life came 
about " like a well-handled ship," because there stood 
at the helm " the unknown steersman whom we call 
God." Amid the grimy horrors of his most powerful, 
but least pleasant book, " The Ebb-Tide," he breaks 
forth into praise of the grace of God ; there is nothing 
in the world " but God's grace. We walk upon it ; we 
breathe it ; and we live and die by it ; it makes the 
nails and axles of the universe." That which gives his 
great scenes their most impressive element is not 
merely their force of imagination or of truth ; it is this 
subtle element of religion which colours them. The 
difference between a great scene of Scott and a great 
scene of Stevenson is that while the first impresses us, 
the second awes us. Words, phrases, sudden flashes 
of spiritual insight, linger in the mind and solemnise 
it. We feel that there is something we have not quite 
fathomed in the passage, and we return to it again and 
again to find it still unfathomable. Wonder and as- 
tonishment sit throned among his thoughts, the won- 
der of the awe-struck child at Divine mysteries, the 
enduring astonishment of the man who moves about 
in worlds not realised. It is this intense religious 
vision which gives Stevenson a place apart among his 
contemporaries ; in his own phrase, it holds him with 
a force " ineluctable as gravity." 

The working of this temper is seen in two directions ; 
in the spiritual background which he gives to all his 
stories, and in his vivid sense of the reality of Evil. 



256 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

There is a striking and almost grotesque illustra- 
tion of the first in " The Ebb-Tide." 

Attwater, the athlete and mystic, and Captain Davis, 
Huish, and Herrick, the detected rogues from the 
stolen ship Farralonc, are seated on the verandah of 
Attwater's house after dinner. Attwater, with delib- 
erate cruelty, has probed the consciences of the three 
unhappy men. Suddenly he strikes a silver bell at his 
side, and asks them to observe its effect. 

The note rose clear and strong; it rang out clear and far into 
the night, and over the deserted island ; it died into the dis- 
tance, until there lingered in the porches of the ear a vibration 
that was sound no longer. " Empty houses, empty sea, soli- 
tary beaches," said Attwater. " And yet God bears the bell. 
And yet we sit on this verandah, on a lighted stage with all 
heaven for spectators." The captain sat mesmerised. At 
length, " bursting with a sigh from the spell that bound him," 
he stammers out, " So you mean to tell me now that you sit 
here evenings, and ring up — well, ring up the angels — by 
yourself?" "As a matter of historic fact, one does not," re- 
plied Attwater. " Why ring a bell when there flows out from 
oneself and everything about one a far more momentous 
silence? The least beat of my heart, and the least thought in 
my mind echoing into Eternity, forever, and forever, and 
forever ? " 

Think of that scene, and try to imagine it. The 
three men are there to plan the murder of Attwater, 
and he knows it. It is a sordid, grisly episode of greed 
and crime you watch. Suddenly, as though the veil 
were rent, the horror of Eternity rushes into view. At 
the sound of the bell the silent hosts of judging angels 
are assembled, and the Last Assize begins. Metaphor- 
ically speaking, that bell of alarm rings through all the 
stories of Stevenson. He writes as one who sees be- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 257 

hind all earthly shows, the vision Marvell pictures 
in his poetry: 

Time's winged chariot hurrying by 
Deserts of vast Eternity. 

And there can be little doubt that the extraordinary 
power with which Stevenson rivets the attention even 
in his slightest stories is due in great part to this 
element of spiritual vision, rare in all writers — rarest 
of all in novelists. 

Another story in which the same silver bell resounds 
is " Markheim," but in this the moral truth is plainer. 
Markheim is another of the men Stevenson was so 
skilled in depicting, the man who fails in life through 
weakness. His weakness at last brings him to an act 
of crime. Late on Christmas Eve he visits a curiosity 
dealer of his acquaintance, and deliberately murders 
him for gain. Here again is an episode as grisly and 
sordid as could be imagined. But in the same instant 
that the earthly crime is consummated the spiritual 
drama commences. Markheim suddenly trembles with 
a dreadful sense that he is not alone. He is " haunted 
and begirt by presences." The twenty-four stairs he 
climbs to the upper chamber, where he means to rifle 
the dead man's goods, are " four-and-twenty agonies." 
There comes " a flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting 
gush of blood," and Markheim stands " transfixed and 
thrilling," for at last he knows there is a following 
step. It is his own Soul that confronts him. The 
unhappy man begins to plead his case with every casu- 
istry known to guilt. Circumstance, and not he, is 
responsible for his crime. He was born and has lived 
in a land of giants who have dragged him by the 



258 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

wrists, the giants of circumstance. He is no worse 
than others whose crimes are undetected. He hates 
evil, even while he does it, and that should count to 
him for righteousness. In any case, this was meant to 
be his last crime. To-morrow he will begin the world 
anew, with a resolution that cannot fail of high re- 
sults. And then his Soul put one tremendous question 
to him : 

" For six-and-thirty years you have been in this world. I 
will propose one simple question, and as you answer I shall 
read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many 
things more lax. . . . But granting that, are you, in any 
one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with 
your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser 
rein?" And Markheim's answer is, "No, in none; I have 
gone down in all." 

And at that point the drama ends. The features of 
the ghostly visitor " undergo a wonderful and lovely 
change." Markheim has confessed his guilt, and calls 
for the police to take him. But the Soul smiles, know- 
ing that in that penitent confession the better nature is 
at last triumphant in the man, and over the darkened 
stage, as in Goethe's great drama, the angelic voices 
cry, " Not ' lost,' but ' saved ! ' " 

It will be seen at once that this story is in effect an 
allegory — for fable and allegory Stevenson always had 
a strong liking — and his power of allegory at last 
found expression in what must always be regarded as 
a masterpiece, " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 

The seed-thought of this appalling fable is familiar 
enough : it is the ancient Pauline description of the war 
in our members, so that the thing we would we do not, 
and the thing we would not, that we do. Dr. Jekyll is 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 259 

the wise physician, prudent, wealthy, respected, fa- 
mous. Mr. Hyde is the worse self that dwells in his 
members. By an accidental discovery Dr. Jekyll finds 
out how to separate these two personalities. He can 
at will cease to be Dr. Jekyll, and become Mr. Hyde. 
When he wearies of the virtues of Dr. Jekyll he can 
adopt the vices of Mr. Hyde. He is secure of secrecy 
— for who would dream of connecting the deformed 
monster, who steals out of Jekyll's house, bent on mid- 
night lust and murder, with the wise physician, known 
far and wide for the goodness of his life, and the 
breadth of his charities? The good and evil are each 
real, and each intolerant of the other. The man is lit- 
erally torn between the good and evil natures ; in his 
right mind given to serious and religious thoughts ; in 
the guise of Mr. Hyde greedy of abominable vices, re- 
penting and sinning in turn ; to the last desirous of 
good, but impotent of achieving it, and all the time 
conscious that the ape-like thing within him grows 
stronger for each fresh liberation and indulgence. It 
is on this fact that the whole tremendous moral of the 
story lies. " This was the shocking thing," writes 
Stevenson, " that the slime of the pit seemed to utter 
cries and voices ; that the amorphous dust gesticulated 
and sinned; that what was dead and had no shape 
should usurp the offices of life. And this again : that 
that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a 
wife, closer than an eye ; lay caged in his flesh, where 
he heard it mutter, and felt it struggle to be born ; and 
at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of 
slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out 
of life." 

The appalling moment comes when Mr. Hyde can 



260 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

no more be transformed back to Dr. Jekyll. There is 
no longer a Dr. Jekyll left, only a Mr. Hyde, waiting 
for the hangman, and yet it is the soul of Jekyll that 
cries frantically from the lips of Hyde. 

Such is the story, and although horror pursues us as 
we read it, no one can read it without a stirred con- 
science; no one can lay it down without some sincere 
resolve to set a closer guard upon his virtues, and put 
a stricter curb upon his follies. 

In these three illustrations from his stories we have 
some indication of Stevenson's place as a moralist. 
Here is the Shorter Catechist indeed ; a Calvin of the 
imagination, a Knox speaking in fables. Let it, how- 
ever, be remembered that he had a hopefulness in 
human nature not found in Calvin, and a charity not 
found in Knox. Men need to hear the stern voice of 
the indignant moralist — no age needs it more than 
ours — but they have an even greater need to hear the 
voice that bids them hope. That voice of hope is 
never wanting in Stevenson. He rarely fails to recog- 
nise some positive good in the worst nature that may 
be turned into account. Bellairs, in " The Wrecker," 
one of his ugliest villains, has the virtue of self-sacri- 
fice ; and while he pictures all the baseness of Davis, he 
reminds us, too, " of the endearing blend of his faults 
and virtues, the sudden shining forth of a tenderness 
that lay too deep for tears," in this base man's affection 
for his children. He makes no scruple to talk of the 
grace of God even in relation to his worst rogues. He 
counsels the worst against unfruitful remorse, which 
he calls " an unclean passion." His vision of evil is 
penetratingly clear; his vision of the power of man to 
achieve good is not less clear; and so into the lips 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 261 

of erring mortals he puts that noble prayer, which 
expresses so much of his own valiant and hopeful 
spirit, " Help us with the grace of courage, that we be 
none of us cast down when we sit lamenting amid the 
ruins of our happiness or our integrity ; touch us with 
the fire from the altar that we may be up and doing* 
to rebuild our city." 

No estimate of Stevenson can be complete that does 
not take full account of his poems, his essays, and his 
familiar letters. His poems resemble Emerson's, in a 
certain pregnant felicity of phrase and a relative ina- 
bility to master the technical means of expression. 
Yet he was by nature a poet, lavishly endowed with 
the two great qualities of the poet — imagination and 
sympathy. It is by virtue of these qualities that he has 
written quite the best, because the truest, essay that 
has ever been written upon Robert Burns. Carlyle 
has not surpassed him in sincerity, and at some points 
he has altogether surpassed Carlyle in the friendly yet 
searching insight with which he has interpreted the 
darker secrets and the worst motives of Burns' tragic 
life. His sketch of Villon is equally memorable in its 
subtlety of insight, and is, besides, a most picturesque 
and vivid reconstruction of lost history. But the essays 
which will take the highest rank are naturally those 
which are most expressive of the author's own per- 
sonality. In his power of minute self-revelation he 
resembles Montaigne. It matters little of what he 
writes ; he never fails to project some lovable, or at 
least fascinating, image of himself across the page. 
The spirit of candour with which he expresses him- 
self is the spirit in which he regards mankind. There 
is a fine catholicity about him which makes him able 



262 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

to apprehend the most diverse natures, and to sweep 
into the orbit of their lives at unexpected angles. Beg- 
gars, gypsies, sailors, shepherds, rude chestnut-gath- 
erers of the Cevennes, and abnormal creatures like 
Villon — he finds something in each which corresponds 
to something in himself, and he shares with them 
what he has finely called " man's enduring astonish- 
ment at his own position." His own position was 
sufficiently astonishing. If ever man had just cause 
to write gravely, and even bitterly, on matters per- 
taining to human destiny, it was this man ; yet his 
spirit is throughout touched not only with a stoic cour- 
age, but with inimitable gaiety. His " supreme and 
splendid characteristic " is, as Mr. Chesterton has so 
finely phrased it, " a certain airy wisdom, a certain 
light and cool rationality, which is very rare and very 
difficult indeed to those who are greatly thwarted or 
tormented in life." It is levity indeed — it is Mr. 
Chesterton's word — but it is a reasoned levity, " the 
flower of a hundred grave philosophies." 

Yet though we accept the term, we can only accept 
it as a mental characteristic. The " airy wisdom," the 
" light and cool rationality," play over profound moral 
depths. He uses many bye-paths, but they always 
conduct him to the great issues of life. In his lightest 
mood his eye is busy with the things that lie beneath 
the surface. Thus the foul air of an emigrant car 
suggests this notable flash of criticism : 



I think we are human only in virtue of our open windows. 
Without fresh air you only require a bad heart and a remark- 
able command of the Queen's English to become such another 
as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and 
wagging your scut on mountains of offense. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 263 

In the same way the spectacle of the Chinese 
emigrants opens up illimitable thoughts : 

For my own part [he says] I could not look but with wonder 
and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the 
stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and 
printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of 
manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire 
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk 
the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. 
They hear the clock sound the same hour, but surely of a 
different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with 
such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as 
might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought 
within the circuit of the Great Wall ; what the wry-eyed, 
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; 
religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy along- 
side ; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things 
therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for 
thousands of miles over plain and mountain. 

It is not the facile and joyous essayist who speaks in 
this passage, but the serious-hearted observer of life. 
In one of his earliest books, the " Travels with a Don- 
key in the Cevennes," full as it is of the light-hearted 
and mercurial spirits of youth, the same trait is pres- 
ent. The delightful humour of the early chapters 
conducts us to the country of the Camisards and the 
monastery of Our Lady of the Snows ; or perhaps I 
should say that the humour accompanies rather than 
conducts us, for the special charm of the book is its 
varying mood, and that in no mood whatever is the 
humour out of sight. It is the surest of all bonds 
between writer and reader, and we are equally con- 
scious of it, whether we goad the unhappy Modestine 
up the mountains, or discuss theology with the monks 



264 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

of the Trappist retreat. It seems a perfectly natural 
thing with Stevenson to be one moment laughing over 
the imbecilities of an unhappy ass, and the next gravely 
discussing the martyrdom of the Camisards, and thrill- 
ing in heart to the noble speeches of the accused 
leader, Seguier: 

" Your name ? " they asked. 
" Pierre Seguier." 
" Your domicile?" 

" Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven." 
"Have you no remorse for your crimes?" 
" I have committed none. My soul is like a garden full of 
shelter and of fountains." 

In the familiar letters the same characteristics are 
even more clearly displayed. It is very possible that 
the day may come when of all that he has written the 
letters will be most cherished as his real testament to 
the human race. The eye that has grown careless over 
his essays or his stories will kindle afresh over these 
more intimate confessions, which display a courage, a 
vivacity, and a joy in life which would be remarkable 
in a strong man, but are almost unique in a man whose 
whole life was spent in the shadow of death. The 
mind lingers long over such a confession as this : 
" Sick or well, I have had a splendid life of it, grudge 
nothing, regret very little, and — take it all over — ■ 
would hardly exchange with any man of my time, un- 
less perhaps it were Gordon, or our friend Chalmers " 
— Chalmers being the great missionary and heroic 
martyr of New Guinea. The strenuous life never had 
a more convinced advocate, nor a more conspicuous 
example than this man, who amid constant disappoint- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 265 

ment and difficulty could write with boyish cheerful- 
ness, " Still, it's good fun." He deliberately set him- 
self to achieve what he has called " the great task of 
happiness." He will sing no " Miserere " ; that par- 
ticular piece of music, he tells us, he takes to be the 
composition of an atheist. He believes " in the ulti- 
mate decency of things " : " Ay, and if I awoke in hell, 
should still believe in it." He wonders when he listens 
to the loud song of the crickets at the close of the day 
round his ruined hut on the Silverado mountain, " why 
these creatures are so happy, and what was wrong with 
man, that he also did not wind up his day with an hour 
or two of shouting." The lesson he has to teach is the 
saving virtue of manliness ; and from these familiar 
letters the most gallant of human souls greets us, 
speaking in high soldierly accents to the timid, in 
cheerful irony to the recreant, in warm encourage- 
ment to the struggler, in human-hearted sympathy to 
all. The spirit of his whole life is expressed in the 
prayer he wrote for the beginning of the day's toil: 
" Give us to go blithely about our business. Help us 
to play the man ; help us to perform the petty round 
of irritating concerns and duties with laughter and 
kind faces " ; and in the evening prayer, written but 
twenty-four hours before his death, " Call us up with 
morning faces, and with morning hearts, eager to be 
happy, if happiness shall be our portion ; and if the 
day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it." 

Stevenson died as he lived ; to the last full of zest in 
life, happy, buoyant, laborious. He who had lived all 
his days in expectation of death, when it came experi- 
enced no premonitory shadow — " God's finger touched 
him, and he slept." His death brought a grief to 



266 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

thousands of homes the wide world over, to thousands 
of men and women to whom he was much more than a 
writer — a counsellor, an inspiring presence, a dear 
and beloved friend. When he once praised his native 
cook for his skill, saying, " Great is thy wisdom," the 
man replied, " Great is thy love." And it might be 
said of Stevenson himself, that great as was the ad- 
miration men felt for his wisdom, the love he inspired 
was yet greater. He had in a rare degree " the genius 
to be loved," which is after all the noblest form of 
genius. He earned the highest reward of genius, 
which is to live in the affectionate memory of men. His 
work for the world is very far from done because his 
bodily presence is withdrawn from it ; he remains, 
and unless all the signs be false, must long remain, as 
a spirit in men's thoughts, strengthening the feeble, 
uplifting the timid, and animating the strong to a wise 
and heroic use of life. The verses written on his tomb 
in far Samoa express excellently that strenuous zest 
of life which animated him to the last: 

Under the wide and starry sky 

Dig the grave and let me die. 
Glad did I live, and gladly die, 

And I laid me down with a will. 

This be the verse you grave for me, 
Here he lies where he longed to be, 

Home is the sailor, Home from the sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill. 

But there is another element they do not express, 
the continued life of memory, the restless ardour of 
the soul, felt long after the body is dissolved in dust, 
the influence which the great writer exercises over the 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 267 

mind of succeeding generations, which is his most en- 
during triumph. That part of the epitaph others must 
write for him ; and it cannot be better written than in 
the famous and familiar lines of Matthew Arnold, 
which commemorate all those prophetic souls to whom 
it is given to speak to the universal soul of their race : 

Ye, like angels, appear, 

Radiant with ardour divine, 

Beacons of hope ye appear ! 

Languor is not in your heart, 

Weariness not on your brow, 

Ye alight in our van ! at your voice 

Panic, despair, flee away; 

Ye move through the ranks, recall 

The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 

Praise, reinspire the brave. 

Order, courage return; 

Eyes rekindling, and prayers, 

Follow your steps as ye go, 

Ye fill up the gaps in our files, 

Strengthen the wavering line, 

Stablish, continue our march, 

On, to the bound of the waste, 

On, to the City of God. 



XVIII 
RELIGION IN FICTION 

George Macdonald; J. H. Shorthouse; Mrs. Humphrey 
Ward; Olive Schrcincr; Mark Rutherford. 

FICTION, being both a transcript and a criticism 
of life, nothing that pertains to life is alien to 
it. The novelist, guided by his own tempera- 
ment, deals with that aspect of life which is most fami- 
liar or interesting to himself, and naturally from time 
to time there arises a novelist of distinctive religious 
genius. So far as English fiction is concerned there 
is much in the national temperament and history to 
explain the existence of what may be called the re- 
ligious novel. It can escape no student of history that 
all the great causes which have most powerfully moved 
the English mind have been in essence religious 
causes. The greatest series of battles ever fought on 
English soil were struggles between antagonistic re- 
ligious creeds. The Puritan stood primarily for cer- 
tain spiritual truths ; it was an accident of his time 
that these truths involved the cause of political liberty. 
His antagonist also claimed the consecration of a 
creed which, beginning with certain ecclesiastical con- 
victions, was found to involve the entire theory of 
monarchy. Twice in her history England has got rid 
of a king, but the original cause of offence in each 
instance was as much religious as political. With 

268 



RELIGION IN FICTION 269 

such antecedents it is nothing more than might be ex- 
pected that English fiction should reflect in an un- 
usual degree the religious temper of the race. 

One of the results of long training in liberty of 
thought is that the average Englishman holds himself 
competent to discuss any subject under the sun, how- 
ever intricate and philosophic, and to pass an opinion 
on it which he deems worthy of respect. Naturally 
the novelist shares this estimate, which is common to 
the nation. He is quite indifferent to the charge that 
he has had no special training for the discussion of 
theological problems. His opinions are as good as 
other people's, and he claims the right to state them. 
Hence in a nation much given to religious thinking, 
delighting in debate for its own sake, in the main pro- 
foundly sincere in its desire for truth, and easily im- 
passioned by spiritual ideas, it is inevitable that re- 
ligion should be constantly expressed in fiction. 

But here it becomes necessary to distinguish, with 
some care for exact definition, what may be properly 
described as a religious novel. Clearly it is not the 
novel into which religion enters as one among many 
composite qualities, or the novel in which a sense of 
religion is more or less accidental, because most really 
good novels answer to this description. Thackeray, 
as we have seen, has many passages touched with the 
purest spirit of piety; Dickens, with a much slenderer 
sense of religion, nevertheless attempts its exposition; 
Kingsley writes always with distinct religious aim. 
There are passages in both Charlotte Bronte and 
George Eliot which might have been written by some 
passionate poet of religious ideas, some St. Catherine 
or St. Theresa — notably the noble close of " Villette," 



270 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

the preface to " Middlemarch," the sermon of Dinah 
Morris on the village green, and the spiritual experi- 
ences of Maggie Tulliver. Even Daniel Defoe has 
rare moments when he makes us conscious of the 
things that lie " on the other side of Time," and in 
Stevenson this consciousness is always dominant. 
Yet in the strict sense of the term not one of these 
writers has produced a religious novel. They have 
touched the religious chord because it is one of the 
common chords of humanity. The effort of their art 
was to sweep the full compass of life, and they could 
not, as mere artists, ignore the religious chord. 

The religious novel proper is that which centres it- 
self expressly, definitely, and by distinct limitation on 
the exposition of religious ideas or the statement of 
theological problems. It may take into its scheme a 
wide or a narrow area of human action, but it will take 
no more than is necessary to its special purpose. It 
may create types of character as vital as any that may 
be found in more secular forms of fiction, but that is a 
question of the power of the artist, not of the intention 
of his art. In other words, the religious novel is a 
novel in which the faculty of creative imagination is 
definitely devoted, and in some instances subordinated, 
to the exposition of religious ideas. 

Such a definition may serve in the work of discrimi- 
nation, but it is indicatory rather than judicial. 
Where, for instance, are we to rank such books as 
Mrs. Beecher-Stowe's " Uncle Tom's Cabin " and 
Hawthorne's " Scarlet Letter " ? Both are great 
books, so great that no history of fiction can ignore 
them. It is probable that no novel ever written has 
had such an immense popularity or has exerted so 



RELIGION IN FICTION 271 

great an influence on human affairs as " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." In its power of simple pathos, in its passion- 
ate humanitarianism, in its instinctive art, it is unique. 
It has the rare kind of greatness which belongs to a 
large and simple design faithfully executed. If it 
has ceased to be read, it is because the cause it pleaded 
is won — the highest possible tribute to its influence. 
Hawthorne's novel has the same merit of complete 
simplicity of design, but united with a profound moral 
insight, and governed by a fine and rare artistic sense. 
It has the purity and the " severity of perfect light." 
Its theme is sin and conscience, and in this sense it 
is a religious novel, as " Uncle Tom's Cabin " is a re- 
ligious novel by virtue of the religious spirit which 
conceived and informs it. Yet in the strict sense 
neither quite answers the definition of a novel com- 
pletely devoted to the exposition of religious ideas. 
Neither could have existed apart from the religious 
sense, but neither binds itself to the sole exposition of 
religious ideas. For, in the main, Mrs. Stowe is 
humanitarian rather than religious ; and if we dis- 
tinguish between the spirit of Hawthorne's art, and 
the material on which it works, we recognise in him 
the spirit of the Greek dramatist dealing with the large 
issues of fate, and only touched incidentally by modern 
theological conceptions. 

Putting aside, then, the vast array of novels which 
appeal to religious sentiment — some of them fairly 
meritorious, most of them poor in theme and faulty 
in construction — there are not more than three or 
four names which stand for high achievement in this 
realm of literature. Foremost is the name of George 
Macdonald, a writer of real genius, whose influence 



2*72 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

in contemporary religious thought has been much 
greater than the present generation is aware of. The 
pivot of his entire theological system is the Father- 
hood of God, with its logical corollaries of human per- 
fectibility and universal restoration. In his own way 
he has uttered in fiction the message which Maurice 
uttered in theology, and Tennyson and Browning in 
poetry. He nowhere minimises sin, but he every- 
where teaches that evil cannot last for ever. Eternal 
sin enduring in the presence of eternal holiness is to 
him unthinkable. Somewhere, sometime, love will be 
supreme ; and of all the souls which God has made, not 
one will be lost, or 

Cast as rubbish to the void 
When He hath made the pile complete. 

He once said characteristically that when Protes- 
tantism revised the Eschatology of Rome it eliminated 
the wrong thing; it should have retained Purgatory 
and left out Hell. With the religious value of these 
conclusions the critic of fiction has nothing to do ; all 
that he has to do is to observe the method of their 
expression, and how far they have or have not served 
the purposes of imaginative art. It may be at once 
replied that in George Macdonald's writings these con- 
ceptions have, at all events, not hindered the freedom 
of his art. They are so much a part of himself, that it 
is as natural for him to write of dour Scots Calvinists 
trying to shed their ancestral creed, as it is for Kipling 
to write of soldiers and machinery. That the con- 
troversialist sometimes deposes the artist no one will 
deny; so also the artist in Kipling is sometimes sub- 
servient to the ship's engineer. The great thing, how- 



RELIGION IN FICTION 273 

ever, is that the writer should be sincere, and then his 
art will be sincere. Macdonald has this entire sin- 
cerity, and it has been the secret of his wide-spread 
influence. 

The general spirit of Macdonald's teaching may be 
best studied in such books as " David Elginbrod " and 
" Robert Falconer." Here, for example, are certain 
passages in " Robert Falconer " which deeply pene- 
trate the memory, and do so because they move the 
heart : 

One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion 
destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable sel- 
fishness. 

" They are in God's hands." he says of fallen women ; " He 
hasn't done with them yet. Shall it take less time to make a 
woman than to make a world? Is not the woman the greater? 
She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries of crawling 
slime, yet rise a woman at last." 

" Did you ever observe that there is not one word about the 
vices of the poor in the Bible, from beginning to end?" 

"But they have their vices?" 

" Undubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full 
enough of the vices of the rich. I make no comment." 

Of a poor, gin-sodden woman with a smiling child in 
her arms, he says : 

A child, fresh from God, finds its heaven where no one else 
would. The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the 
devil himself cannot drive Paradise out of a woman. 

And where is there a more tenderly exquisite picture 
of the contrition of a soiled soul than this? Falconer 



274 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

is reading the story of Magdalene to a company of 
sinners : 

Some one sobbed again. It was a small, slender girl with a 
face disfigured with small-pox, and save for the tearful look it 
wore, poor and expressionless. Falconer said something gen- 
tle to her. 

" Will He ever come again ? " she sobbed. 

"Who?" said Falconer. 

" Him — Jesus Christ. I've heard tell, I think, that He was 
to come again some day." 

" Why do you ask ? " 

" Because," she said, with a fresh burst of tears, which 
rendered the words that followed unintelligible. But she 
recovered herself in a few minutes, and, as if finishing her 
sentence, put her hand up to her poor, thin, colourless hair, 
and said, " My hair ain't long enough to wipe His feet." 

A much less influential writer, but a more delicate 
artist, is Mr. Shorthouse, the author of " John Ingle- 
sant." " John Inglesant " is a book about which 
opinion is much divided. Its worst fault is lack of 
spontaneity. It betrays the implacable drudgery by 
which it was produced. It resembles a much worked- 
on picture, touched and retouched into laborious per- 
fection; and there is no kind of picture less accept- 
able to the true critic of art, who rightly prefers the 
rough vigour of a sketch in which genius is unem- 
barrassed and careless of detail. But the large brush 
of the unconscious artist does not belong to Mr. 
Shorthouse; he works with the finest of brushes, 
slowly and with elaboration, until the perfection of 
the part becomes a kind of imperfection. It is this 
over-elaborateness which makes the book appear 
tedious to many readers. It is packed too tight with 
thought ; its impact is not direct enough ; it is too dia- 



RELIGION IN FICTION 275 

lectic ; which is the common vice of the religious 
novel. Yet it has many passages of extraordinary 
brilliance. The battle of beliefs, and the much 
greater battle between flesh and spirit, have rarely 
been described with such masterly analysis. And be- 
cause it is in parts so restrained as to be almost frigid, 
when the true passionate fire of vehement emotion 
begins to burn it burns with surprising intensity. 
There is a kind of eloquence in Mr. Shorthouse's best 
writing only comparable with those almost lyric out- 
bursts which we find in Charlotte Bronte's writings — 
the last pages of " Villette," for example, the descrip- 
tion of Rachel's acting, or the description of Eve in 
" Shirley." 

Who can read unmoved the passage which pictures 
the vision of Christ which comes to Malvolti, the 
murderer of Inglesant's brother? 

He came down the steps — and He came to me. He was not 
at all like the pictures of the saints, for He was pale and worn 
and thin, as though the fight were not yet half over — ah, no !— 
but through this pale and worn look shone infinite power, and 
undying love, and unquenchable resolve. The crowd fell back 
on every side, but when He came to me He stopped. "Ah ! " 
he cried, "is it thou? What doest thou here? Knowest thou 
not that thou art Mine? Thrice Mine — Mine centuries ago, 
when I hung upon the Cross of Calvary for such as thee — 
Mine years ago, when thou earnest a little child to the font — 
Mine once again, when forfeit by every law, thou wast given 
over to Me by one who is a servant and a friend of Mine. 
Surely I will repay." As He spake a trembling ran through 
the crowd, as if stirred by the breath of His voice. Nature 
seemed to rally and to grow beneath Him, and heaven to bend 
down to touch the earth. A healing sense of help and com- 
fort, like the gentle dew, visited the weary heart. A great 
cry and shout rose from the crowd, and He passed on; but 



276 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

amid ten thousand times ten thousand I should know Him, 
and amid the tumult of a universe I should hear the faintest 
whispering of His voice. 

Equally powerful, but in another way, is the 
memorable picture of the night in the forest with 
Lauretta, with its fierce temptation. Inglesant realises 
that a trap has been set for his soul. In the moonlight 
every leaf of the forest shone with unnatural distinct- 
ness ; the silence was terrible ; it seemed as though 
Nature herself waited breathlessly to see his ruin. 

The sylvan arcades seemed like a painful scene-piece upon a 
Satanic stage, supernaturally alight to further deeds of sin, 
and silent and unpeopled, lest the wrong should be interrupted 
or checked. To Inglesant's excited fancy evil beings thronged 
its shadowy paths, present to the spiritual sense, though con- 
cealed of set purpose from the feeble human sight. . . . The 
hour was admirably chosen, the place perfectly adapted in 
every way, as if the result, not of happy chance, but deeply 
concerted plan. Why then did he hesitate? . . . He had 
prepared the way for the tempter, and this night even he had 
disregarded the warning voice and drifted recklessly onward. 
We walk of our own free will, heated and inflamed by wine, 
down the flowery path which we have ourselves decorated 
with garlands, and we murmur because we reach the fatal goal. 

The deadly glamour of moonlight faded suddenly; a calm, 
pale, solemn light settled over the forest ... a fresh and 
cooling breeze sprang up and passed through the rustling 
wood, breathing pureness and life. The day-spring was at 
hand in the eastern sky. 

The rustling breeze was like a whisper from heaven that 
reminded him of his better self. It would seem hell overdid it; 
the very stillness for miles around, the almost concerted plan, 
sent flashing through his brain the remembrance of another 
house, equally guarded for a like purpose, into which years ago 
he had forced his way to render help in such a case as this. 
The long-past life of those days rushed into his mind — the 



RELIGION IN FICTION 277 

sacramental Sundays, the repeated vows, the light of heaven in 
the soul, the kneeling forms in Little Gidding Chapel, the face 
of Mary Collet, the loveliness that blessed the earth where she 
walked, her death-bed, and her dying words. 

He came back into the room. Lauretta lay upon a couch, 
with rich drapery and cushions, her face buried in her hands. 
. . . As he entered she raised her face from her hands, 
and looked at him with a strange, apprehensive, expectant 
gaze. He remained for a moment silent, his face very pale; 
then he said, slowly and uncertainly, like a man speaking in a 
dream : 

" The fatal miasma is rising from the plain, Lauretta. This 
place is safe for neither of us; we had better go on." 

The dramatic impressiveness of the scene is evident, 
but its spiritual force is yet more obvious. And this is 
the greatest quality of the writer — a certain delicate 
and subtle power of spiritual apprehension, which has 
given to his one noticeable book a very high place in 
literature, and a still higher in the category of religious 
novels. 

Of a wholly different spirit is Mrs. Humphrey Ward. 
It has been somewhat the fashion of late to decry 
her, but few will deny that at times she is both a 
delicate and powerful artist. Considered merely as 
a novel, " Marcella " is her best book, and the chap- 
ters which describe the life and fate of Hurd the 
poacher are admirable examples of pathos and realism. 
In these chapters she competes with Kingsley, and ex- 
cels him. But as a religious novelist her chief claim 
is based on " Robert Elsmere." Few books have ever 
attained so great a vogue. " Robert Elsmere " was the 
subject of innumerable reviews; it was preached about 
and denounced in hundreds of pulpits; all the forces 
of the Church were rallied to oppose its conclusions, 



278 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

and for a considerable time little else was talked of 
among thoughtful people. And yet, what was the 
dangerous thesis which it expounded? Nothing more 
than this — the conclusions of the Higher Criticism on 
the Book of Daniel. Two figures absorb the atten- 
tion — an atheistic squire, and a peculiarly sensitive 
and not very robust-minded young clergyman, who 
appears to think that the entire cause of Christianity 
depends upon the date at which the Book of Daniel 
was written. It is an amazing situation. The Higher 
Critics have travelled a long way since " Robert Els- 
mere " was written, and so far as we can judge have 
done very little harm to Christianity. The last shot 
is fired, and still the citadel remains uninjured; much 
heavier batteries than those which demolished the faith 
of Elsmere have been called into action, and yet the 
popular faith in Christianity shows no diminution. 

A later generation is thankful to the critics for la- 
bours which have made the Bible more interesting 
by making it more intelligible ; and the common-sense 
verdict has been reached, that it is of small conse- 
quence whether there was one Isaiah or two, as long as 
the marvellous poetry of the book moves the heart and 
uplifts the soul ; or for what purpose, or when, the 
Book of Daniel was written, as long as it does un- 
doubtedly expound moral ideas without which nations 
cannot thrive. Had these conclusions been general 
when " Robert Elsmere " was written, the book would 
have attracted no notice. 

A much more powerful writer, greater alike as ar- 
tist, thinker, and poet, is Olive Schreiner. 

When her famous " Story of an African Farm " 
appeared under the nom de plume of Ralph Iron, it 



RELIGION IN FICTION 279 

attracted little attention. The title was not inviting, 
nor did it give a suggestion of the true range of the 
book. It is one of the ironies of criticism that the 
same eyes which saw all manner of deadly elements 
subversive of Christian faith in " Robert Elsmere " 
should have been so slow to perceive the much more 
perilous stuff contained in this book. For here we 
have an indictment directed, not against certain de- 
tails in Christian evidence, but against the scheme of 
the universe itself. The thoughts that move in Olive 
Schreiner's mind are of a kind that make " a goblin 
of the sun." Life is for her one long irony; she might 
have said with Heine, " The irony of God lies heavy on 
me." Heine himself never harangued the Almighty 
with words winged with a bitterer passion of revolt. 
Scorn of life, of its mingled littleness and cruelty; 
scorn of the human mind, of its imbecility and irra- 
tional make-believe ; scorn of love, as a passion base 
and futile ; scorn of all accepted creeds, of all social 
systems, and above all, and bitterer than all, self-scorn, 
which mocks the heart capable of adoring ideals it 
has no strength to follow, of capitulating to creeds it 
has not power to believe, of hungering for food which 
it knows is not bread, — this agony of scorn is the chief 
note in this extraordinary book. She walks among 
broken lives ; she treads everywhere on broken hearts. 
The boy Waldo breaks his heart over a God who 
gives him no sign. Em breaks her heart over a lover 
who is false to her. Lyndall herself dies in lonely 
agony, the victim of some horrible blunder for which 
no explanation is offered. Why seek to explain what 
has no explanation ? Why interrogate God or Nature ? 
Each is alike dumb, each is but a name. Why set your 



280 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

heart on lofty things? The higher your ideal, the 
more certain are you to be tortured. Life plays a hun- 
dred brutal tricks upon the helpless puppet Man; but 
life reserves its utmost ingenuity of malice for the 
best. The more delicate your powers, the more fine 
and sensitive your nature, the more ruthlessly will life 
pursue you with malevolence. Waldo's little machine, 
on which he has expended all his hopes, suddenly 
trampled under-foot in sheer lust of cruelty, is a 
parable of life itself; even so, brute force is always 
happiest when it is trampling on the weak. The only 
people who can get through life with tolerable equa- 
nimity are the thick-skinned people. Tant' Sannie, the 
Boer woman, does not suffer because she is insensitive. 
It is only low organisms such as hers that are fitted 
for such a world as this ; manifestly the world is no 
place for people with brains and ideals and sensitive 
emotions, who are always striving to lift themselves 
out of the primal mire where man was first fashioned. 
So the bitter indictment runs, with an ever-deepening 
note of agony. Revolt throbs in every page. The 
phrases are dipped in heart's blood and living flame. 
No more significant book has ever been addressed to 
Christian readers ; very few books in the last half- 
century of fiction display anything like the same in- 
tense and subtle genius. 

Yet the book is not all bitterness ; if it were, it would 
scarcely have attracted its thousands of readers, the 
great majority of whom have no acquaintance with 
the theological problems discussed by its author. The 
secret of its power is that it is a broadly human book, 
a human document of first-rate importance. It 
records a spiritual experience, it is one of the great 



RELIGION IN FICTION 281 

confessions of literature, and there is no kind of book 
so certain of fame as the book which is genuinely con- 
fessional. Here is a young girl, brought up in the im- 
mense loneliness of the African veldt ; imperfectly 
educated, yet touched with the unrest of modern know- 
ledge ; full of beautiful idealism, yet forced into con- 
tact with a kind of life which is coarse and constricted ; 
seeking in vain amid a sordid environment for some 
soul capable of correspondence with her own ; stretch- 
ing out her hands to life in a passion of baffled desire ; 
forced by the loneliness of her position to think her 
own thoughts, to follow her own intuitions, to guess 
wildly at truth, without the least opportunity to cor- 
rect her thoughts by the standard of general experi- 
ence ; and in seeking to express the voices of her own 
soul, she becomes the spokesman of multitudes of 
lonely and unguided lives. For the true problem Olive 
Schreiner presents to the world is not a problem of the 
intellect, but the problem of the heart. How paltry 
are the questions discussed by Mrs. Ward compared 
with the questions discussed by this untutored girl ! 
And how shallow is the disquiet created in the mind 
of Elsmere compared with the fierce agony of soul 
which this book reveals ! Here, indeed, " the wounded 
is the wounding heart." A few people here and there 
may be troubled over the authorship of the Book of 
Daniel, but here is a much deeper and more catholic 
kind of trouble — trouble over the mystery of life, the 
anguish of fruitless prayers and ruined hopes, the 
abominable pain endured by men and women capable 
of lofty things, but helpless in the grip of circum- 
stance; rage against the injustice of life, the eye to 
see a path the feet will never tread, the will to do the 



282 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

great things fate forbids. It is the tragedy of the 
caged life that beats against the bars, and sinks at 
last exhausted by its fruitless struggle. And it is a 
common tragedy old as humanity itself, and hence the 
fascination of the book. All who have struggled in 
vain, all who have had high dreams which have melted 
in the light of common day, all who have sought the 
unattainable, all who have stood amid the broken idols 
of ideals and creeds, find in Olive Schreiner an inter- 
preter, and her confession is the confession of their 
own baffled wills. 

The book also pleads a cause — the cause of woman. 
It is essentially a woman's protest on behalf of women, 
intensely felt, and spoken with infinite energy and elo- 
quence. " Pathos, wit, humour, epigram, dialectic ; 
tenderness and scorn ; sarcasm, irony, and banter ; 
things original and things indisputable ; touches of 
poetry and pleading, followed instantly by the bitterest 
invective, — all are here, and all are expressed with 
masterly ease and vigour." " We bear the world, and 
we make it," she says of woman. 

The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and 
tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on 
them, and that is a mother's, or at best a woman's. There 
never was a great man who had not a great mother — it is 
hardly an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make 
us; all that is added later is veneer; and yet some say, if a 
woman can cook a dinner, or dress herself well, she has 
culture enough. 

Of all the injustices wrought in the earth, no injustice 
is so great as that which is constantly visited on 
woman. The responsibilities of the race are confided 



RELIGION IN FICTION 283 

to her, yet she herself is scarcely treated as a respon- 
sible creature. A dimple in the cheek, or a finely 
turned wrist, will serve her better in the struggle of 
life than brains and intellect. 

The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for 
climbing. 

It is delightful to be a woman, but every man thanks the 
Lord devoutly that he isn't one. 

The same note of bitterness is found in the writings 
of Mark Rutherford, whose " Autobiography " has 
become a classic for readers of discernment, and 
whose remarkable stories, " The Revolution in Tan- 
ner's Lane " and " Catherine Furze," have won for 
themselves an abiding place in modern fiction. 

The characteristic note of these books is a certain 
sad lucidity of vision. They are the confessions of an 
over-sensitive mind, for which the riddle of existence 
has proved too hard. They depict the struggles of a 
human soul in search of truth and faith ; the wish to 
believe, at war with the conditions of belief; the 
martyrdom of a fine nature, too scrupulously honest 
to purchase peace by those conventional casuistries 
which rule commonplace minds ; the tragedy of a 
superior nature, forced by the hand of fate into asso- 
ciation with natures either mean or narrow, or dull 
and unillumined, which are capable of no response, 
and indeed of no vital contact with his own. Mark 
Rutherford, with all his capacity for both delicate 
thought and passionate emotion, is thrust into the 
narrowest of worlds. It is useless to declare his real 
thoughts, for no one would understand them. He is 
supposed to have been trained for the ministry, in a 



284 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

college where not a single problem of faith or religion 
has ever been stated honestly. His instructor was an 
elderly gentleman, with a pompous degree of Doctor 
of Divinity — " a gentleman with lightish hair, with 
a most mellifluous voice, and a most pastoral manner, 
reading his prim little tracts to us, directed against the 
shallow infidel. About a dozen of these tracts settled 
the infidel, and the whole mass of unbelief, from the 
time of Celsus downwards." 

He becomes the minister of a stagnant church in 
a stagnant little town, where the only person who can 
afford him the least degree of intellectual comrade- 
ship as an atheistic printer. He drifts from this to a 
yet more stagnant Unitarian chapel ; finds that the 
longer he preaches the less he has to communicate; 
plunges at last into the vortex of London life, endur- 
ing all the indignities of the poor and unconsidered ; 
attaining at last just enough faith in altruistic ideals to 
attempt a little social work for the outcasts of Drury 
Lane. This is the brief story of the " Autobio- 
graphy " ; but it is told with such extraordinary in- 
tensity, it abounds in such vivid sketches of character, 
it is so pregnant with emotion, so exquisitely phrased, 
so rich in subtle analysis of the most secret passions 
of the heart, at once so frank, subtle, and sympathetic, 
that it possesses an incomparable charm, and ranks 
with the highest works of imaginative genius. 

" No theory of the world is possible " is the last 
word of Rutherford's message. With perfect frank- 
ness he admits that he has erred in attempting to 
grapple questions too big for him, and he counsels men 
against the folly of too exorbitant curiosity. His 
only positive counsel is the old counsel of stoicism. 



RELIGION IN FICTION 285 

There is no condition of life from which a man may 
not extract some grains of happiness, if he does not 
retain his fortitude and the readiness to find joy in 
simple pleasures. Men constantly make the mistake 
of asking too much of life. They expect ideal af- 
fections, and scorn the plain bread of human love. 
The woman whom Rutherford despised for her intel- 
lectual limitations becomes in the end his honoured 
wife. Some natures, and especially natures of un- 
usual depth and sweetness, never reveal their riches 
except in the hour of trial. If any justification can be 
found for what seem the senseless sufferings of human 
life, it is that these sufferings do liberate the best ele- 
ments of fine characters. One of the most tender 
passages in the " Autobiography " describes the pro- 
cess by which a young girl, whom he loved little be- 
cause he thought her dull and stupid, becomes a per- 
fect nurse to his sick wife: 

Faculties unsuspected grew almost to full height in a single 
day. ... I remember once going to her cot in the night as 
she lay asleep, and almost breaking my heart over her with 
remorse and thankfulness, — remorse, that I, with blundering 
stupidity, had judged her so superficially; and thankfulness 
that it had pleased God to present to me so much of His own 
divinest grace. . . . My love to Marie was love to God 
Himself as He is — an unrestrained adoration of Him, adora- 
tion transfigured into love, because the revelation had clothed 
itself with a child's form. ... I had seen the Kingdom 
of God through a little child. 

He who can thus misread his fellow-creature may 
well ask himself whether he has not also misread 
God. If no theory of the world is possible, there 
may nevertheless exist enough of hint and sugges- 



286 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

tion to encourage hope, or at least to make a wise man 
diffident in denial. 

The proper attitude, the attitude enjoined by the severest 
exercise of the reason is, " I do not know " ; and in this there 
is an element of hope, now rising and now falling, but always 
sufficient to prevent that blank despair which we must feel if 
we consider it as settled that when we lie down under the 
grass there is an absolute end. 

It may be doubted if any writer has ever rendered 
mental agony with such power as Mark Rutherford. 
Doubt is for him not a philosophic balancing of proba- 
bilities ; it is a cruel force which rends his heart in 
twain. And his doubt goes very much beyond the 
questioning of this or that assumption of orthodox 
faith ; it arraigns the whole scheme of things. He 
is unable to discern any sign that the " soul of the 
universe is just." He uniformly represents the com- 
fortable rewards of life as falling to the unworthy, or 
at least to persons of featureless character. He pic- 
tures person after person, lavishly equipped with fine 
faculties of thought or affection, either denied the op- 
portunity of their development, or put into a position 
which makes these very faculties a means of torture. 
He himself is a case in point. There should have been 
some place in society which he might have occupied 
with content and honour, but he never found it. He 
has an immense capacity for friendship, he would 
gladly have died for a friend ; but he finds repeatedly 
that the ardour is all upon his side, that he calls thrice 
upon a friend for once that his friend calls on him, that 
he has stooped even to the point of shame and humi- 
liation to give a love which no one values. He is 



RELIGION IN FICTION 287 

made to feel that he is a superfluous person, nearly 
useless to the world. The agony of loneliness is some- 
times too great for endurance. Yet something re- 
mains to him ; for the Gospel of Christ reinterpreted 
by the conditions of his own life comes back to him 
with new emphasis and consolation. Christ also was 
lonely. His Gospel is particularly designed to be the 
gospel of the lonely and the despised. It has nothing 
to say to the prosperous whom the world suffices. 

The story of Jesus is the story of the poor and the forgotten. 
He is not the Saviour of the rich and the prosperous, for they 
want no Saviour . . . but every one who has walked in 
sadness because his destiny has not fitted his aspiration ; every 
one who, having no opportunity to lift himself out of his nar- 
row town or village circle of acquaintances, has thirsted for 
something beyond what they can give him ; everybody who, 
with nothing but a dim daily round of mechanical routine be- 
fore him, would welcome death if it were martyrdom for a 
cause ; every humblest creature, in the obscurity of great cities 
or remote hamlets, who silently does his or her daily duty 
without recognition,— all these turn to Jesus and find them- 
selves in Him. . . . There is no Saviour for us like the 
hero who has passed triumphantly through the distress which 
troubles us. Salvation is the spectacle of a victory of another 
over foes like our own. 

It may be objected that reflections of this kind are 
better suited to the essay than to the novel, and it 
must be admitted that in the strict sense of the term 
the " Autobiography " is doubtful fiction. Much of it 
is but thinly disguised personal confession ; perhaps, if 
the truth were known, there is not a single invented 
incident in the entire book. Yet the hand of the 
creative artist is visible in every line. Whether the 
people he pictures are idealised types or portraits of 



288 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

known persons — and perhaps they are something of 
each — it is certain that they are rendered with ex- 
traordinary vividness. 

No extract, and no series of extracts, can do justice 
to the writings of Mark Rutherford. They have 
qualities which give them a place apart in later litera- 
ture. He speaks as one who has greatly suffered, 
and hence he speaks as no other can to the suffering 
heart. He is the interpreter of inarticulate natures. 
The actual message which he has to deliver may be 
brief, but it is vital because it has been tested and 
sanctified by experience. He writes also with a 
curious pregnancy of phrase. His style is austere and 
simple, shorn of all redundancy, of all deliberate elo- 
quence or laboured novelty, yet it is the most sugges- 
tive of styles. It is a triumph of severity and com- 
pression. Those who read his books once find them- 
selves returning to them again and again ; they hold 
the mind with an incomparable charm ; they quicken 
thought, they reveal the deep things of life, and, in 
spite of their quiet rejection of orthodox faith, they 
have a strange power of creating that larger faith 
which is based, not on dogma, but on the universal 
instincts of humanity. Other writers of religious 
fiction represent certain phases of thought and feeling 
peculiar to their time ; Mark Rutherford deals with the 
great secular thoughts of humanity. Sincere and ac- 
complished as a writer like Mrs. Humphrey Ward 
may be in the examination of religious problems, yet 
her message seems shallow and almost insincere in 
comparison with the message of Mark Rutherford. 
For here is authentic suffering — here is spiritual 
tragedy which goes to the very roots of life; and 



RELIGION IN FICTION 289 

hence the influence which Mark Rutherford exercises 
over minds that are sympathetic with him is unique. 
It is perhaps more perilous to forecast the future of 
books than of nations ; but it would not be surprising 
if the writings of Mark Rutherford, or at least his 
" Autobiography," should take rank with the famous 
classics and the imperishable treasures of English 
literature. 



XIX 

AMERICAN NOVELISTS 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864. Edgar Allan Poe, 1809- 
1849. 

THE history of American fiction is brief, as 
is natural in the case of a people whose own 
history is brief. In the early days of a great 
people there is little room for the development of 
those arts which minister to the aesthetic and the 
imaginative faculties. The tasks of practical and con- 
structive civilisation must needs be the first employ- 
ment of a pioneer nation. The conquest of the wilder- 
ness, the building and ordering of cities, the gradual 
driving of the wedge of light into the darkness of the 
aboriginal waste, the development of the land and its 
resources, the pushing on of the railroad, the pro- 
vision for the elementary needs of life, all the vast 
epic of labor, all the absorbing romance of commerce — 
these are the first chapters in the history of any new 
civilisation. Not until wealth is accumulated and 
leisure is achieved can literature flourish. And the 
last form of literature to arise is fiction. A kind of 
life which in itself is fiercely romantic feels no need of 
the romance of the pen. It is only when a nation be- 
gins to recall and recollect its past that there is room 
for the author whose work is in essence a criticism of 
life. 

290 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 291 

Nevertheless, America has produced at least two 
writers who deserve to rank with the great masters 
and makers of fiction. The first of these is Nathaniel 
Hawthorne. Hawthorne's life was lived at a period 
when the throes of initial civilisation were over in that 
portion of America in which his lot was cast. The 
civilisation of New England had been accomplished. 
It was possible to draw breath and to gain a coign of 
vantage from which sober perspective was attained. 
The story of the past was full of suggestion to a 
philosophic mind. It abounded in splendid episodes 
of valour and heroism ; it was dominated by austere 
ideals of duty ; it was the story of the making of man- 
hood, under the plastic stress of difficulties and vicis- 
situdes scarcely paralleled in the history of any people. 
Here was the material to hand for a great artist, a 
great philosopher, and Hawthorne was both. He had 
a mind of singular depth, which brooded much over 
the secrets of personality. The men who founded 
New England were themselves fascinated by the prob- 
lems of philosophy and they transmitted the tendency. 
Nothing in the heroic details of their lives seemed to 
them so important as the history of their spiritual emo- 
tions, their relation to the unseen world and the prob- 
lem of their eternal destiny. They retained through 
generations the characteristics of the Puritan move- 
ment which begot them. Stern and hard, and un- 
imaginative as they appeared, yet each thrilled to the 
romance of the infinite. They were conscious of vi- 
brations of light from far-off worlds. They moved in 
the constant awe of a divine tribunal, dimly seen, 
but acutely realised in every fibre of their conscious- 
ness. 



292 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Hawthorne inherited this temperament to the full. 
But he added to it something that was rare in the New 
England temperament, something indeed that was his- 
torically hostile to it, the gift of the artist, who is so 
far detached from life that he can analyse, review, and 
judge it. He could understand the past and yet be 
sceptical of its conclusions. He sympathised, but he 
also criticised. This painful quality of scepticism is 
vital to the artist ; not till doubt dissolves the hardness 
of tradition is any real criticism of life possible. But 
the more necessary is the interpretive sympathy, which 
comprehends modes of life and thought which the con- 
science no longer regards as authoritative. Haw- 
thorne possessed all these characteristics, and it is in 
virtue of them that he became the greatest writer of 
fiction whom America has produced. 

Reference has already been made to Hawthorne's 
greatest work " The Scarlet Letter." It is this book 
upon which his fame as a writer of fiction must rest. 
For to be ranked with the makers of fiction something 
more is needed than high artistic efficiency : the maker 
of fiction is he whose work is both perfect and original. 
Hawthorne triumphs completely under this last. 
There is much in his other books that any writer might 
have been proud to produce. He has written nothing 
that does not bear the marks of long, and often pro- 
found meditation. The reader of his " Note Book " 
will not need to be informed how sedulously Haw- 
thorne tabulated ideas, suggestions of thought, traits 
of character, passing flashes of intuition into human 
motive and conduct. His style also is distinctive, 
though often laboured. He is at all times a master of 
felicitous phrase. But chief among all his qualities 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 293 

and characteristics is a certain awful sombreness of 
imagination. His mind brooded perpetually over the 
more tragic and austere aspects of human life. Of 
vivacity, that happy nimbleness and levity of thought, 
which is so characteristic of the modern American, he 
reveals no trace. He belonged to an older world. 
His eye scans not the surface but the depth and issue 
of things. In his milder moods he can observe life 
with a kind of faint geniality, but such moods are in- 
frequent. His real concern is always with the soul. 
His whole temper is introspective. Hence his sketches 
of manners, while truly observed and finished with that 
exquisite art which never failed him, always impress 
us as laboured. He does the thing well, but it is not the 
thing that he was born to do. How different is the 
movement of his genius when he approaches the intri- 
cacies and subtleties of the soul. Here his full power 
is revealed. He fascinates us because he is fascinated 
himself. He becomes a wizard, a magician before 
whose touch the inmost doors of personality fly open. 
The sombre brooding mind, the mind of the philosophic 
thinker, deeply tinged with the serious thinkings of a 
long race of men and women, to whom the affairs of 
the soul were the only real concerns of life, here finds 
its most adequate and therefore its most characteristic 
expression. 

In the " Scarlet Letter " we have Hawthorne's pecu- 
liar genius in its ripest manifestation. Perhaps the 
most remarkable characteristic of the story is the ar- 
tistic restraint which characterises it. Here is a story 
which in weak hands might easily have become melo- 
dramatic, and in careless hands offensive to the moral 
sense. The fineness of Hawthorne's artistic gift saves 



294 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

him from the first error and the Puritan austerity of 
his temperament from the second. In his hands the 
story has all the sombre dignity of Greek drama. Two 
sinful creatures confront us, but while their sin is 
never veiled, it never alienates our sympathy. We un- 
derstand them too well to despise them. The dan- 
gerous proverb that to know all is to forgive all, finds 
some degree of justification as we contemplate the 
nature and the stages of their misdoing. No apology 
for their sin is hinted at or offered : on the contrary it 
bears upon it from the first its predestined condemna- 
tion. If we contrast the similar episode of Arthur 
Donnethorne and Hetty Sorrel we are at once aware of 
the enormous gulf that yawns between a spiritual and 
a scientific estimate of human life. For George Eliot, 
in spite of a temperament essentially moral and even 
religious, sees but dimly in the realm of the spiritual. 
On the contrary, Hawthorne's genius is essentially 
spiritual. George Eliot is content to paint outward 
consequence ; Hawthorne is concerned with the much 
more awful tragedy of inward defilement. George 
Eliot sees a moral problem ; Hawthorne a spiritual. 
The thing that George Eliot bids us see is weakness ; 
a weak man who is the prey of evil passion, and a weak 
girl who is the victim of idle vanity. Let them be 
reprobated, but let them also be pitied : it is so that 
Nature in her inscrutable irony has fashioned them by 
heredity and environment. But simply because Haw- 
thorne is the child of an austere Puritanism, he treats 
the whole problem from a very different standpoint. 
Mistress Prynne is not a weak woman. She is cast 
in a mould of antique breadth and dignity. She is 
radically a pure woman, not liable to the seductions of 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 295 

petty vanity or the gusts of thoughtless passion. And, 
again, while the minister is weak of will, yet he also 
has all the spiritual instincts in their fullest force. 
This is a putting of the tragedy of passion remarkable 
alike in its breadth and daring. The difference in the 
method of Hawthorne's statement of the most ancient 
of all problems and George Eliot's is this : that 
whereas George Eliot, in common with most novelists, 
choose weak natures to illustrate a common frailty, 
Hawthorne chooses strong and dignified natures, and 
in doing this he raises the austere theme to the height 
of pure and great drama. 

It is this feature of the book that fixes it so indelibly 
upon the mind and makes it so alarming. We can 
read of Hetty Sorrel's bitter folly without a pang of 
self fear. " It is not so with us and cannot be," we 
say. We can contemplate as David did the far-off 
sin with feelings in which pity and scorn and anger 
are in turn predominant, but our withers are un- 
wrung. But Hawthorne comes to us with the terrible 
allocution " Thou art the man." In showing us the 
corruption of the good and the frailty of the strong 
he makes us tremble for ourselves. Terror seizes upon 
us as we read— a terror that shakes the spirit. For 
Hawthorne is more than a novelist depicting an event, 
he is a prophet who seizes on the reins of the soul. 
The summed up spiritualities of a long Puritan an- 
cestry speak in him, and they speak to the deepest soul 
of man. 

" The Scarlet Letter " has for its dominant motive 
expiation — that motive which is the source of so much 
that is great and moving in Greek tragedy. Yet with 
that firmness of touch, that undeviating perception of 



296 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

inexorable fate which characterises all great tragedy, 
there is mingled another element rare in any tragedy, 
which may be best described as spiritual subtlety. We 
are made to feel that the " Scarlet Letter " is not so 
much embroidered on the dress of Hester Prynne as 
scorched upon her heart. In like manner, although 
no emblem of shame burns upon the heart of the minis- 
ter, we know that his shame consumes him, and the 
suffering thus endured by slow degrees becomes noble 
because it is purgatorial. In moral stature these two 
guilty persons tower far above their accusers and their 
judges. They at least know the meaning of love, 
which is a knowledge never attained by the narrow, 
vindictive natures that surround them. The bitter 
cruelty of the wronged husband is a worse sin than that 
committed against him by the minister whom he hates. 
In making this clear, Hawthorne breaks with the He- 
braic ideal which is the root of Puritanism, and ex- 
presses the most characteristic truth of Christianity. 
For of all the sayings of our Lord none are so startling, 
and indeed so revolutionary as these two : that she who 
loves much is forgiven much and that he who hates his 
brother, even upon what seems a just cause, is in 
danger of hell-fire. Such axioms are so far above all 
common conceptions of morality that even moral 
thinkers find it safer to forget them. He alone is 
fitted so much as to contemplate them who surveys life 
from a great height of purity. For to purity alone is 
given the insight which understands guilt. Hawthorne 
has that understanding — the understanding which is 
insight. Thus, in treating a theme often enough 
treated by novelists and dramatists, Hawthorne has dis- 
played a spiritual delicacy altogether unrivalled, and 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 297 

without diminishing the element of drama has carried 
the whole theme into the difficult realm of spiritual 
allegory. 

Judged from whatever standpoint we may choose to 
accept, " The Scarlet Letter " is a masterpiece. In 
style, in method, in spiritual force, it is a great book 
and it remains not only the noblest achievement of 
American literature, but ranks with the masterpieces 
of universal literature. In many of the qualities com- 
mon among great novelists Hawthorne was deficient. 
He is often more of an essayist than a novelist. His 
mind is not fecund, not rapid ; the careless ease of the 
great improvisor is unknown to him. He struggles for 
expression ; his ideas come to birth by severe throes. 
He is too exigent a critic of himself to abandon his 
mind to the force of his ideas. That full, wide, effort- 
less sweep of power found in Scott, and Balzac, and 
the Brontes, is not his ; excellent as are all his books, 
yet they often fail to please or fascinate: the mind 
wearies of an excellence that is technical. But in 
" The Scarlet Letter " his entire power works freely, 
without let or hindrance. His genius soars at last 
untrammelled, like a pure flame long repressed. No 
happier fate can happen to an artist than to find his 
genius and his task so exquisitely adjusted that the 
result is perfect. It may happen but once in a long 
career, yet the true artist knows that on this one oc- 
casion his whole career stands justified ; it was for this 
hour that he was born and by its record he must live. 
To Hawthorne in the course of a long literary career 
there came this one perfect moment, this consummate 
hour. " The Scarlet Letter " is the book that he was 
born to write, for no other could have written it; and 



298 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

it is the permanent memorial of a rare and delicate 
genius. 

The second great name in American fiction is Ed- 
gar Allan Poe. He shares with Hawthorne but one 
quality, a taste for the occult. In every other respect 
he is totally dissimilar. He knew little of the element 
of restraint either in his art or in his life. His life 
was woefully misdirected. In his art he cannot be ac- 
quitted of the charge of charlatanism. He was vain, 
violent, and without conscience. His poetry, genuine 
as it is, is full of tricks and mannerisms, and he is not 
above exposing the trickiness of his method when it 
pleases him to do so. But with all his faults and limi- 
tations he was a man of supreme literary ability and a 
great artist. The power that he possessed was limited, 
but it was genuine and of rare quality. He was in- 
capable of producing the deliberate and sustained 
novel : but in the art which produces the short story 
he was a master. His genius is fugitive, brilliant, 
brief in its expression, but nevertheless it is genius of 
a kind unique, separate, and astonishing. 

Few men have united in the same degree analytical 
acumen with imaginative force. From the first 
faculty sprang a series of stories which deal with the 
mysteries of crime, of which the " Murder in the Rue 
Morgue " is the outstanding example. Later genera- 
tions which have marvelled over the method of Sher- 
lock Holmes will find that Poe used precisely the same 
method in his stories which deal with crime and the 
wiles of criminals. The similarity is so close that it 
cannot be accidental. We have the same acute obser- 
vation of trifles, the same deductions based on circum- 
stances in themselves unnoticeable, the same piecing 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 299 

together of evidence, until what seems an insoluble 
enigma becomes a mathematical demonstration. But 
Poe is at all times superior to the author of Sherlock 
Holmes. He deals with deeper motives, his psycho- 
logical skill is more subtle, and the secret of his puzzle 
is more carefully concealed. " The Gold Bug " is 
probably an example of the finest cryptogram in litera- 
ture. Many writers have used a similar motive, in- 
cluding Stevenson in his " Treasure Island," but none 
has displayed so complete a mastery of means. There 
is something almost diabolic in the cleverness of Poe 
in this kind of a story. The detective story may be but 
a poor form of art, but it undoubtedly has great fasci- 
nation for the reader; and, if it is to be truly success- 
ful, requires singular gifts of penetration and analysis 
in the author. Poe's gift of analysis enabled him to 
lift what is radically a poor form of art into superb 
excellence. He invested the detective story with the 
dignity which belongs to the display of real thought, 
and the depiction of real tragedy. In this respect he 
must be ranked with the masters of fiction. 

But Poe possessed another kind of power even more 
remarkable, viz., an extraordinary vividness of imagi- 
nation. That his imagination was disordered and 
radically diseased few can doubt. He revels in hor- 
rors, he loves the monstrous, the deformed, the ab- 
normal : the world as he sees it is the phantasmagoria 
of a drunkard's appalling dreams. But in spite of 
much that is grotesque and repulsive, Poe compels our 
admiration by the extraordinary force of his imagina- 
tion. By his mere use of words in many instances he 
produces on the mind a sense of fear, of haunted twi- 
light, of immeasurable melancholy. The " Fall of the 



300 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

House of Usher " is such an instance. Put into bald 
prose there is no story and nothing to tell, but Poe uses 
words as music is used in the interpretation of emotion. 
He strikes a long chord which reverberates through 
the soul : produces wailing notes that thrill us with the 
premonition of disaster : a sombre gloom fills the mind ; 
with nothing real, nothing tangible before us, we 
shiver as though a spectre touched us ; and this rever- 
berant horror grows with every new phrase, till utter 
eclipse overwhelms us and the blood chills in the veins. 
How is it done? We can only reply by a kind of 
magic. It is as though the Mephistopheles, who a 
moment ago laid bare the realities of this gross life 
with sneering cleverness, now waves a wizard's wand, 
grows pale with occult ecstacy, soars in thin flame, 
slowly withdraws the forbidden curtain of destiny and 
shows us in wavering awful outlines the hooded forms 
that haunt the outer darkness of a demon world. 
Balzac has endeavoured to produce this effect, but with 
scant success. Stevenson has succeeded in such a 
story as " Thrawn Janet." But Poe alone is a master 
of horror, the true wizard who alone knows this entire 
secret of literary occultism. 

No writer in English literature has dealt so entirely 
with the more fugitive and phantasmal forms of the 
imagination. In his best tales he inspires a sort of 
breathless terror. But what is more remarkable is 
that in the realm of the wildest fantasy the coolness of 
his logical faculty is undisturbed. He can give the 
aspect of complete reality to things that in themselves 
are incredible and impossible. An excellent example 
of this power is in the story which he calls " A Descent 
into the Maelstrom." 



AMERICAN NOVELISTS 301 

Manifestly no such adventure could have happened. 
But Poe, by the calm matter-of-fact way in which he 
assumes the possibility of the adventure, at once com- 
pels attention, and sustains it. In this respect he re- 
sembles Defoe, with whom he has no other gift in 
common. He writes both as a mathematician and a 
dreamer: and this not alternately, but with a complete 
fusion of qualities which seem not only far apart, but 
antagonistic. And in all his writings there is a most 
careful attention to style. He is a master of phrase, 
using words with a scholarly attention to the nicety 
of their significance and a poet's perception of their 
harmonies. The result is a series of stories which have 
become classical. They have survived the test of time 
and are probably more widely known and read to-day 
than at any period since their production. Their 
unique excellence is proved by the fact that while they 
have had many rivals, they are still unrivalled. Both as 
poet and prose writer Poe still stands in the first rank 
of imaginative writers, and is one of the few men of 
creative genius in American literature. 

In that literature many other writers will be found 
of great excellence, but upon the whole Hawthorne 
and Poe are the only writers whose contributions to 
fiction have unique value .and distinction. No reader 
of intelligence will forget the graceful work of Wash- 
ington Irving, and the wonderful popular gift of Har- 
riet Beecher Stowe. The native genius of Mrs. Stowe 
is quite extraordinary, and had her artistic training 
been equal to her natural gift, she might have claimed 
a place among the greatest writers. Among the more 
recent writers none have produced work of greater ex- 
cellence than W. D. Howells. A grateful memory 



302 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

will also recall the name of Mark Twain, the unrivalled 
master of a form of humour essentially of the New 
World; of Bret Harte, whose earlier stories have real 
pathos and dramatic instinct; and Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, whose genial philosophy has been a source of 
pleasure to multitudes of readers. 

During the last decade, American fiction has made 
great strides. It is significant that the American pub- 
lisher no longer turns to England to discover authors 
whose books will captivate the public. American 
writers are rapidly arising who perceive the romance 
of their own country and find in the daily life of their 
own people ample material for the purposes of fiction. 
Such a writer as the late Frank Norris, whose early 
death was a national disaster, shows an epic power 
in dealing with the world of commerce, which had in 
it the promise of assured greatness ; and the path which 
he took will no doubt be followed by many others. In 
no country are the materials for a new school of fiction 
more abundant. Among no people is any new form of 
genius more warmly welcomed, or generously re- 
warded. America has not yet produced a novelist 
comparable in gift and scope of power with Meredith 
or Hardy ; yet it may well happen that the next great 
master of fiction may arise in America, as more and 
more the leisure won by industrial success affords op- 
portunity for that life of culture which is the true goal 
of all civilised endeavour. 



XX 

CONCLUDING SURVEY 

IN the preceding chapters we have traced the 
growth and development of the English novel in 
the examples of its greatest masters. Men and 
women of genius, guided by their own authoritative 
impulses, have found in prose fiction a means of ex- 
pression for their religious, philosophic, and social be- 
liefs — for their gaiety, fancy, and humour — for their 
powers of observation and reflection ; and each in turn 
has contributed some enduring element of personality 
or art to the novel. The evolutionary principle in this 
long history is not always apparent. It is only when 
we measure the distance traversed that we are con- 
scious of its influence. Some " plastic stress," work- 
ing upon individual genius, has exercised compulsion 
and restraint, has moulded thought and form. The 
great writer is the creature of taste as well as its crea- 
tor. His greatness is reached through a superior 
sensitiveness to the conditions of his time. Writing 
to fulfil the necessities of his own thought and emotion, 
he finds that he has expressed with more or less ful- 
ness the characteristics of his age. In the degree that 
a writer does this, his work is famous, and witnesses to 
the evolutionary principle. 

Some general reflections upon the histories and 
achievements discussed in the foregoing pages may 
now be permitted. 

303 



304 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

First of all, there will doubtless exist on the part of 
many readers a desire to revise or dispute some of the 
verdicts arrived at. Imaginative literature differs from 
every other form of literature in one important feature 
— viz., that it affords an opportunity for transient dis- 
tinction, which contains no guarantee of settled fame. 
It has often been said, and with a considerable measure 
of truth, that every novelist of real parts has it in him 
to write one great novel. What this means is, that 
there is usually some particular province of life known 
to a novelist with surprising accuracy, and that in 
writing on such a theme he writes impressively. There 
are things which he himself has suffered and endured 
— various poignant emotions of joy or sorrow, con- 
flicts of mind and will, doubts in search of truth, and 
rebuffs in search of fortune ; and even a mediocre 
writer, writing upon things deeply felt, is often able 
to produce a book which attracts universal attention 
among his contemporaries. Every season brings us 
some novel which achieves distinction. It is read, dis- 
cussed, admired, and enthusiastic critics predict a new 
Thackeray or Dickens. Such a book as Du Maurier's 
" Trilby " is a case in point. The author strikes a 
vein of observation which is fresh and original — he 
pictures something he knows; and the result is that 
his work receives an applause which even a Thackeray 
or a Dickens would have regarded as unstinted. Later 
on it becomes clear that the writer has said all he had 
to say in his first book. He has packed it with his 
ripest experience of men and things. He has written 
his own autobiography, and in the nature of things 
he cannot write it twice. His book is really fine, but it 
is a tour de force. It soon becomes evident that he has 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 305 

not the true creative instinct of the great artist — he 
has not his fecundity, nor his variety, nor his staying 
power. A history of fiction, written at the time when 
his star was paramount, could not ignore him ; but in 
the calm mood of wider retrospect his name is received 
in silence, not because he has not done well, but be- 
cause his total achievement is slight. 

The history of fiction is full of personal triumphs of 
this order. It would be possible to mention a score 
of books by forgotten authors, each of which in its 
kind may be compared favourably with single works 
of the great masters. The critics who praised them 
were not wholly wrong in their judgment; at least, 
they were not wrong after the fashion of the older 
critics, who quite honestly put Montgomery's " Satan " 
in comparison with the poems of Shelley, to the indig- 
nant dispraise of the latter. As long as the art of 
fiction endures there will appear from time to time 
really admirable and brilliant books which achieve a 
personal triumph. They well deserve their triumph, 
because they are the products of intimate expe- 
rience, motive, and observation. 

But in the long run the fame of a novelist must rest 
upon much broader foundations, if it is to endure. He 
must be able to deal adequately, not with a phase of 
life, but with life in many phases. He must draw upon 
other treasures than those of autobiography. He must 
have the power of understanding, by imaginative sym- 
pathy, lives totally unlike his own, and of creating 
characters of which his own personal experience gives 
him no clue. In other words, he must be an artist, 
seeing the whole of life as much as it is given to man 
to see it, bringing to his task an instinct no doubt 



306 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

sharpened by experience, but going - much beyond 
experience, into the realms where genius alone can 
penetrate by the force of its intuitions. 

It is by such a test, if we have the skill to apply it, 
that we can distinguish between what is ephemeral 
and what enduring, even in contemporary fiction. An 
author writes a book which is unmistakably a tran- 
script of experience. Some little known part of the 
world, India, Malay, or even a Scotch glen, is pre- 
sented to us with vivid force. Types of character, 
hitherto unknown to us, are drawn with a truth which 
we feel is vital. We are sure that the writer is telling 
us what he himself has felt and seen, and we instantly 
hail him as a great novelist. But the very fact that he 
does so unmistakably tell us what he himself has felt 
and seen should put us on our guard. " Well and 
good," we should say ; " he has shown himself a 
graphic artist — is he also a creative artist ? " The 
thing seen counts for much less than the thing imag- 
ined. Any man of highly sensitive powers of observa- 
tion can describe the things seen ; but it needs a much 
rarer order of mind to describe the things imagined. 
Kipling has seen his Mulvaney and his Ortheris, but 
Shakespeare never saw Hamlet, nor Dickens Mrs. 
Gamp, nor Thackeray Becky Sharp. The former are 
photographs, the latter portraits. It is not the visual 
eye, however keen, that can discover Hamlet, or Mrs. 
Gamp, or Becky Sharp ; they are creatures of the 
imagination, built up, indeed, from much scattered 
material, but combined by creative art into types of 
universal life. 

When a novelist is accused of something which is 
improbable or incredible in his story, he usually retorts 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 307 

that he has only described life as he has seen it. The 
plea appears good, but it is really invalid, because this 
is the very thing that he should not do. Stevenson's 
Captain Wicks, in " The Wrecker," puts this point with 
rare conciseness, when he replies, to Carthew, who 
pleads that the log-book of The Flying Scud is "real 
life." " So it is ; and what better are we for that, if 
it don't look so ? " — thus " sounding unwonted depths 
of art criticism." It is not enough to describe life as 
it is — the novelist must make it look like life. The 
newspaper correspondent describes real life in the 
slum or on the battlefield, and we are satisfied with his 
work so long as it is accurate and honest. But we 
demand of the artist something more — he must not 
only see life as it is, but he must select and combine 
from life the elements which are capable of artistic 
expression. Turner saw landscapes with as true an 
eye as man ever had, and his thousands of pencil 
sketches show that he was the most conscientious and 
delicate of draughtsmen. But Turner's great fame 
does not rest on draughtsmanship. The land- 
scapes he painted were not the landscapes he saw ; they 
were Nature interpreted through his own wonderful 
artistic sense. So with the novelist ; if he does no more 
than describe what he has seen he is but a draughts- 
man ; to become an artist he must select and combine 
the materials won by observation into ideal forms 
which nevertheless look like life. All art is after all a 
form of illusion. The statue simulates the living form, 
the canvas simulates the sunset and the movements of 
the sea and clouds ; the one point with which the 
onlooker is concerned is that the illusion shall be 
perfect. The supreme test of the novelist is whether 



308 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

he makes his illusion perfect. These are simple dis- 
tinctions, but they are absolute in the study of art, 
whether of the brush or of the pen ; and by their 
application to the work of a novelist we can determine 
with indisputable justice his real rank in the hierarch- 
ies of fiction. 

It is because the true novel is a work of art that it 
is never likely to lose its power over the human mind. 
It may have its periods of decay, as all arts have ; it 
will also have its resurrections into new forms. The 
fear has been constantly expressed that fiction is bound 
to decline through mere staleness or dearth of material. 
All the love-stories have been told ; every possible sit- 
uation in which lovers find themselves has been ex- 
hausted, and all the combinations of plot possible to 
human ingenuity have long since been appropriated. 
The modern novelist comes to a field not only reaped, 
but gleaned. What can he attempt to do which has 
not been already done, and superbly done, by the great 
masters of his craft? No doubt it is much more 
difficult to write a great novel to-day than a century 
ago, when an immense wealth of unused material 
awaited the imaginative writer. Yet there is no cause 
for despair. The old stories become fresh, the trite 
and worn situations become original, when they are 
passed through the alembic of creative genius. The 
great artist makes all things new. Life, after all, con- 
tains very few dramatic situations. They consist of 
events set in motion by the eternal forces of love, 
jealousy, crime, passion, sorrow, heroism, death. They 
have been utilised over and over again in every litera- 
ture of the world. If, in his attempt to depict the 
constant play of these primal forces upon human char- 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 309 

acter and destiny, the novelist complains of poverty 
of theme, he may be assured that the poverty is not 
in the theme, but in himself. Let him bring to his 
task the genius of the artist, and although the story 
he tells may be as old as Homer or Euripides, it will 
nevertheless strike the chord of universal interest. He 
may plagiarise freely from his predecessors ; no one 
will count that plagiarism which transmutes old ma- 
terial into new forms. The palette of the painter 
holds no more primary colours to-day than it held in 
the day of Titian ; the seven notes of music are the 
same as when Handel used them ; yet both colour and 
music are still capable of indeterminable combinations. 
The old themes and situations are the primary colours 
and the fundamental notes of the novelist ; they are 
his to combine and to treat as he will. Given a Rem- 
brandt, there is a new art ; given a Wagner, there is a 
new music ; and when the great novelist brings to his 
task the true creative instinct, there is the same fresh- 
ness of conception which makes Rembrandt great in 
spite of Titian, and Wagner, in spite of Handel. 

In one respect the modern novel shows a great ad- 
vance on its predecessors — viz., in its technical perfec- 
tion. Its art may be thin and poor, but its craftsman- 
ship is excellent. The story is usually told with 
vivacity and clearness, the plot is skilfully contrived, 
the interest is sustained, and the writing often has a 
real grace of style. The average of sound literary 
craftsmanship is to-day much higher than it ever was. 
If we take at random any half-dozen novels of the 
present season and compare them with the novels 
produced by writers not of the first rank fifty years 
ago, we are struck at once by the great advance in 



310 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

technique. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that 
every season there is published one or more novels 
which would have made a great reputation fifty years 
go. The average of good craftsmanship in fiction has 
risen in the ratio of increased literary perception and 
education among the people. It is much more difficult 
to reach the front in any profession to-day than fifty 
years ago, because the number of competent competi- 
tors is much larger. In fiction the struggle of exis- 
tence is keener than in any other form of literature ; 
and the chief fruit of this struggle is, that the com- 
petitors have learned the value of competent equip- 
ment, they have studied methods, and consequently 
they are able to produce books which reach a very 
high level of technical excellence. 

But it must not be forgotten that the best technique 
is a poor substitute for creative genius. The com- 
parison between draughtsmanship and art may once 
more serve us. There were never so many people in 
the world who can draw accurately as to-day, and 
never so few great artists. Any one who examines 
the works of a thoroughly good art school will be 
astonished at their general excellence, but he will also 
feel their want of initiative. We are in much the same 
position in respect of fiction. We have to say as 
Reynolds said of a picture which had every quality 
but genius, " It has not that ! " It is the large touch, 
the profound emotion, the creative power, which is 
lacking. The modern novel tends too much to become 
the expanded anecdote. The novelist carves cherry- 
stones — exquisitely, no doubt, but the total result is 
small. He lights up a corner of existence with flashing 
brilliance, but he has no eye for the harmonious mass, 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 311 

the large groupings of life. The very insistence on 
technique narrows him. While he polishes his sen- 
tences and contrives the ingenious convolutions of his 
plot, the broad effects of tone escape him. We may 
have much to say against a superbly careless writer 
like Scott, who gave little thought to technique ; nev- 
ertheless, Scott has that — the wide sweep of creative 
power. Technical excellence is after all only a minor 
morality in art, and it becomes less a gain than a peril 
when its value is exaggerated at the expense of crea- 
tive genius. It then becomes a powerful element in 
the discouragement of genius, and the triumph of 
mediocrity. 

Much would be gained for the novel of the future 
by a return to broad fundamental themes. It is true 
that a great theme can be adequately treated only by a 
great artist, but he who boldly attacks a great theme 
at least gives himself the chance of being great. The 
influence of Flaubert and other writers of his school 
upon English fiction has not been wholesome, con- 
sidered only as an influence on art. The search for 
expression, the passion for meticulous felicity of 
phrase, the careful, exacting mosaic work of the 
phrase-maker, tend to barrenness of invention and 
imagination. Flaubert himself escapes the peril be- 
cause he was a great man ; but his disciples, not being 
all of them great men, have succumbed to it. It can- 
not be too strongly insisted that no grace of expression 
can serve as a substitute for wealth of conception. 
The greatest novels are uniformly those which deal 
with broad and simple themes. Laborious phrase- 
making is neither needed nor present in these novels. 
They move easily and swiftly; it is their matter which 



312 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

fascinates the mind rather than their form ; they 
attract and hold us, not by virtue of style, though this 
may be present in abundance, but by the influence they 
exert upon our sympathies and our emotions. Their 
subject-matter is of relative indifference. Their scene 
may be Fagin's kitchen or Gaunt House. The people 
described may be rascals or heroes. The great point 
is that, whatever they are, they are swayed by elemen- 
tal motives, and, wherever they act, the stage is life. 
The expanded anecdote, the brief episode of passion 
or of intrigue, cannot compete with these broad and 
living dramas. They amuse the idle hour of the idle 
reader, but they reach neither his heart nor his intel- 
lect. He who would paint life with fulness, and in 
doing it achieve the fame that endures when the im- 
pertinence of mere notoriety is forgotten, must set 
himself deliberately to the treatment of the great and 
trite themes of which mankind never tires, because 
mankind understands them and delights in them. 

The greatest peril of the modern novelist lies in the 
relative ease with which popularity is won, and the 
kind of demand made upon his talent by this popular- 
ity. No man is so often a victim of what Kipling has 
called " the damnation of the cheque-book." The 
moment his work is sought for the temptation to over- 
write himself assails him, and in his feverish effort to 
meet the extravagant demand made upon him it is 
inevitable that the quality of his work must deteriorate. 
Another form of the same temptation is the demand 
of the multitude for the constant repetition of any form 
of art which has pleased them. Like the painter who 
must needs go on reproducing variations of a theme 
which has caught the passing taste, if he is to retain 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 313 

his popularity, so the novelist must stick to the vein 
in which his first success is won. The public resents 
versatility either in the artist or the novelist. The 
result is thoroughly bad for art. The free movement 
of genius is arrested. The novelist writes, not to please 
himself, not to fulfil his own ideals, but to please his 
public. He becomes stereotyped both in theme and 
method. Editors of journals, who naturally think 
more of the condition of the market than of the claims 
of art, discourage the novelist when he seeks to strike 
out a new path for himself. He who has written a 
detective story must go on writing detective stories to 
the end of his days, or run the risk of losing his 
public ; for is it not only fair that the public who pay 
the piper should also call the tune? No real progress 
in English fiction can be anticipated while these con- 
ditions prevail. There is but one rule of life possible 
to the man of genius who seeks the full development 
of his powers : he must write to please himself ; he 
must care more for the perfection of his art than for 
its rewards ; he must live the self-respecting life of the 
artist, unseduced by the glitter of social ambitions ; 
he must realise that he is the appointed teacher of the 
public, and he must not become its slave. The man 
who acts thus rarely fails to come to his own, if he 
have the patience to persevere. He who acts other- 
wise may gain the praise and reward of a day, but 
he travels to oblivion. 

Should prose fiction be included in the highest 
category of the literary art? Any doubt on such a 
subject probably arises from the ease with which a 
certain skill in fiction may be attained by writers not 
remarkable for any high qualities of intellect. With 



314 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

nothing to teach, with no philosophy to unfold, with 
no extensive knowledge of life, and often with an 
education both narrow and defective, it is, neverthe- 
less, possible for men and women to write novels 
which attract attention and secure popularity. But 
such examples are misleading. Between the produc- 
tions of such writers and the works of a Meredith or 
a Hardy there is the kind of difference which exists 
between the smooth and even verse of the minor bard 
and the poetry of Shelley, the clever dialogue of the 
modern playwright and the drama of Shakespeare. A 
great artist can make a great thing of any form of art. 
Prose fiction, in the hands of its greatest masters, has 
proved itself a vehicle for the expression of the most 
serious thoughts, the noblest visions, the profoundest 
philosophic teachings which genius can communicate 
to the world. It has displaced the drama ; it is not 
impossible that it may in time displace poetry too, as 
the most popular means of instructing man through 
the imagination. It has great advantages over poetry 
as a means of expression — a wider canvas, a more 
catholic choice of material, and freedom from the 
bondage of rhythm. Already we see that many per- 
sons gifted with some power of feeling and imagina- 
tion, who in an earlier age would have been content 
to publish verse, now express their ideas in fiction. It 
seems not unlikely that poetry will decay in the ratio 
that fiction advances. It seems yet more likely that the 
time will come when every man who has anything to 
say on art or science, on religion or sociology, will 
seek to say it in fiction. These tendencies will inevit- 
ably produce a more general perception of fiction as a 
serious form of literature. We shall recrard it less as 



CONCLUDING SURVEY 315 

a means of amusement than of instruction. Through 
the novel new ideas will be disseminated and new 
solutions of life expounded. Its influence will thus 
steadily increase ; and the more seriously it is accepted 
as a high form of art, the greater will be the care 
taken to perfect its form and develop its scope. 

Nevertheless, we should remember that the prime 
aim of all art is to please. This may serve as a con- 
soling axiom for the multitude of novelists who have 
no creed to impart and no philosophic message to 
unfold. He has not written in vain who is content 
merely to lighten the tedium of life with a cheerful 
wit, to stimulate the fancy, to gild the passing hour, 
to provide a refuge for the weary mind, to summon to 
his mimic stage those who need some pleasurable and 
brief distraction from monotonous and anxious 
thoughts. 

Melancholy seizes on the mind in the recollection 
of the mass of excellent and faithful work done by 
novelists whose names are now totally forgotten. If 
no fame is reached so easily as that of the novelist, 
none withers so quickly. Books that once were read 
by every one are now read by no one ; and in that 
immense grave of buried reputations, where the novel- 
ists and novels of other generations lie, it is difficult 
to disinter the merest evidence of their existence. Let 
it be remembered that these graves of an army never- 
theless cover many strong and noble hearts that 
wrought well according to their measure. They 
served their own generation ; they spoke in living 
accents once ; and, in communicating some element of 
pleasure to their own generation, they did the one task 
possible to them, and they helped forward the art they 



316 MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION 

loved. Of fiction, as of poetry, it may be said, in 
Wordsworth's pregnant phrase, that its true mission 
is " to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to day- 
light by making the happy happier ; to teach the young 
and gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and 
therefore to become more actively and sincerely vir- 
tuous." 

As the atmosphere of the world grows greyer and 
more sombre above the anxious stress of modern life, 
he who can relieve the stress, if only for a moment, 
by taking men out of themselves into some peopled 
realm of fancy, he who can attract the lonely and the 
brooding eye from self-contemplation to the spectacle 
of other lives even though they be imaginary, he who 
can add to the hard prosaic daylight of commonplace 
existence one brief shaft of sunlight by his own gift 
of gaiety or humour, has a work to perform of in- 
comparable value to his race, in the right performance 
of which is exceeding great reward. The work of 
the imaginative writer, whether poet, dramatist, or 
novelist, is always necessary to the growth of the finer 
qualities of the human mind ; and it is more than ever 
necessary in our age as a relief from grinding labour, 
as a sedative to nerves overstrung in material pur- 
suits, as a means of quickening those finer sympathies 
which materialism represses ; and it is because the 
novel thus answers an increasing need in modern life 
that we judge its destiny to be secure and immeasur- 
able. 



By NORMA N DU NCAN 
Doctor Luke iL Labrador 

I2mo, Cloth, $1.50. 



N. V. Evening Post .' "Mr. Duncan is deserving of much praise 
for this, his first novel. ... In his descriptive passages Mr. Duncan is 
sincere to the smallest detail. His characters are painted in with 
bold, wide strokes. . . . Unlike most first novels, 'Dr. Luke' waxes 
stronger as it progresses." 

Henry van Dyke : "It is a real book, founded on truth and 
lighted with imagination, well worth reading and remembering." 

Review of Reviews: "Mr. Duncan has added a new province to 
the realm of literature. This strong, beautiful love story moves with a 
distinctive rhythm that is as fresh as it is new. One of the season's 
two or three best books." 

Hamilton IV. Mabie,in the Ladies' Home Journal '.' "Full of in- 
cidents, dramatically told, of the heroism and romance of humble life; 
strong, tender, pathetic; one of the most wholesome stories of the 
season." 

Current Literature : "Beyond a peradventure, ranks as one of tha 
most remarkable novels issued ia 1904. Stands out so prominently in 
the year's fiction that there is little likelihood of its being over- 
shadowed." 

London Punch: "Since Thackeray wrote the last word of 'Colonel 
Newcome,' nothing finer has been written than the parting scene 
where Skipper Tommy Lovejoy, the rugged old fisherman, answers 
the last call." 

Saturday Evening Post : "There is enough power in this little 
volume to magnetize a dozen of the popular novels of the winter." 

Sir Robert Bond, Premier of Newfoundland : "I shall prize the 
book. It is charmingly written, and faithfully portrays the simple 
lives of the noble-hearted fisher folk." 

Brooklyn Eagle : "Norman Duncan has fulfilled all that was ex- 
pected of him in this story ; it establishes him beyond question as on« 
of the strong masters of present-day fiction." 

FOURTH EDITION 



THE COMPLETE WORKS OF 

Ralph Connor 

The Prospector 125th thousand 

A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass. 

I2mo, $1.50 

"A novel so intense that one grinds his teeth lest the sinews should 
snap ere the strain is released."— Chicago Tribune. 

("riven J 2th thousand 

The Canyon Story from "The Shy Bitot" in Art Gift 
Book Series, beautifully printed in two colors with many 
illustrations and marginal etchings. 

l2mo, art cover, 75c. net 

'Black Rock 450th thousand 

A Tale of the Selkirks, with an Introduction by Prof. 
George Adam Smith. Illustrated by Louis Rhead. 

l2mo Cloth, $1.25 

"Ralph Connor has gone into the heart of the Northwest Canadian 
mountains and has painted for us a picture of lite in the lumber and 
mining-camps of surpassing merit." — St. Louis Globe Democrat. 

The Sky Pilot 

A Tale of the Foothills. Illustrated by Louis Rhead. 

l2mo. cloth, $1.25 

" Ralph Connor's 'Black Rock' was good, but 'The Sky Pilot' is 
better. The matter which he gives us is real life ; virile, true, tender, 
humorous, pathetic, spiritual, wholesome. — The Outlook, 

The Wan From Glengarry l6oth ikou ™ nd 

A Tale of the Ottawa. i2mo. cloth, $1.50 

"A legitimate successor to 'The Sky Pilot' and 'Black Rock,' which 
secured him the swift fame that leaps to the author who strikes a new 
and effective note." — The Literary Digest. 

Glengarry School Days 76th thousand 

A Story of early days in Glengarry. 

l2mo. Illustrated, cloth $1.25 

**. More than that he has given us pictures of that little-known 

country which bring with them clear, cold breaths, the shadows of the 
woods, the grandeur of the tall tree trunks, the strength and the free- 
dom of this outdoor life." — Chicago Journal. 

FLEMING H. REVEIX COMPANY, Publishers 



260th thousand 



A NEW BOOK BY 

NORMAN DUNCAN 
Dr. Grenf ell's Parish 

16 Illustrations, Cloth, $1.00 net. 

Outlook: "It is a series of sketches of Grenfell's work in Labrador. 
A very rare picture the author has given of a very rare man ; a true 
story of adventure which we should like to see in the hands of every 
boy and of every man of whatever age who still retains anything of 
a boyish heroism in his soul." 

N. Y. Globe: "Mr. Duncan has given a very moving picture of 
the dreadfully hard life of the northern fishermen. He has included 
dozens of the little cameos of stories, true stories, as he vouches, full of 
human nature as it is exhibited in primitive conditions." 

Congregationalist : "Norman Duncan draws vivid pictures of the 
Labrador and the ^ervice which Dr. Grenfell has rendered to its 
people. It is a fascinating tale and told with real enthusiam and 
charm. The unusual stage of action and the chivalrous quality of the 
hero, once known, lay hold upon the imagination and will not let go." 

Third "Edition 

* * M 

By DR. WILFRED T. GRENFELL 

The Harbest of the Sea 

16 Illustrations, Cloth, $1.00 net. 

New York Sun: "Relates the life of the North Sea fisherman on 
the now famous Dogger Bank ; the cruel apprenticeship, the bitter 
life, the gallant deeds of courage and of seamanship, die evils of 
drink, the work of the deep sea mission. These are real sea tales 
that will appeal to every one who cares for salt water, and are told 
admirably." 

N. Y. Tribune: "Dr Grenfell tells, in fiction form, but with strict 
adherence to fact, how the mission to deep sea fishermen came to be 
founded among the fishing fleets that frequent the Dogger Bank that 
has figured prominently in the recent international complication. 
It is a story rich in adventure and eloquent of accomplishments for 
the betterment of the men." 

Chicago Tribune: "It is a plain unvarnished tale of the real life 
of the deep sea fishermen and of the efforts which Grenfell's mission 
makes to keep before their minds the words of Him who stilled the 
waters and who chose His bosom disciples from men such as they." 

Brooklyn Eagle: "A robust, inspiring book, making us better ac- 
quainted with a man of the right sort, doing a man's "jvork." 

Third Edition 



THE HUBBARD EXPLORING EXPEDITION 

By DILLON WALLACE 

The Lure of the 
Labrador Wild 

Illustrated 8vo Cloth $1.50 net. 

New York Sun: "A remarkable story, and we are much mistaken 
if it does not become a classic among tales' of exploration." 

Chicago Evening Post : "Two continents became interested in the 
stories that came out of the wild about the hardships of the Hubbard 
expedition Wallace's story and record — they are inseparable — pos- 
sesses in its naked truth more of human interest than scores of volumes 
of imaginative adventure and romance of the wild." 

Review of Reviews : "The chronicle of high, noble purpose and 
achievement and it appeals to the finest, best, and most virile in man." 

Chicago Record-Herald : "One of the most fascinating books of 
travel and adventure in the annals of recent American exploration 
Every man or boy who has ever heard the 'red gods' of the wilder- 
ness calling will revel in these graphic pages, in which the wild odor 
of the pines, the roar of rapids, the thrill of the chase and of thicken- 
ing dangers come vividly to the senses " 

New York Evening Post : "The story is told simply and well. It 
maybe added that for tragic adventure it has scarcely a parallel ex- 
cept in Arctic exploration . " 

New York Evening Mail: "A chronicle of the expedition from 
first to last, and a fine tribute to the memory of Hubbard, whose spirit 
struggled with such pitiable courage against the ravages of a purely 
physical breakdown The story itself is well told." 

Chicago Inter- Ocean: "In the records of the explorations of 
recent yeai there is no more tragic story than that of Hubbard's at- 
tempt to cross the great unexplored and mysterious region of the 
northeastern portion of the North American continent Wallace him- 
self narrowly escaped death in the Labrador wild, but, having been 
rescued, he has brought out of that unknown land a remarkable story. " 

Brooklyn Eagle: "One of the very best stories of a canoe trip into 
the wilds ever written." 

TOURTH EDITION 



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